--- title: "Transformation Through Qigong, Vipassana, and Hermeticism" url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/transformation-through-qigong-vipassana-and-hermeticism/ date: 2024-11-04 modified: 2026-07-03 lang: en author: "Perseus Arcane Academy" description: "Introduction This is one of several student interviews we have coming as I thought it was important to catch up with individuals doing the work, in this case a student..." categories: - "Franz Bardon" - "Interviews" - "Western Traditions" tags: - "Franz Bardon" - "Magic" - "Sixty Skills" image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/DALL·E-2024-11-04-17.12.22-An-abstract-symbolic-representation-of-a-journey-through-spiritual-practices-including-elements-like-energy-flow-meditation-and-enlightenment.-The.jpg word_count: 2014 --- # Transformation Through Qigong, Vipassana, and Hermeticism ## Introduction This is one of several student interviews we have coming as I thought it was important to catch up with individuals doing the work, in this case a student who goes by the name of Jenneke_of_Exile on Discord and would prefer to remain anonymous. I noticed them as they were organizing an informal practice group in the SixtySkills discord. I was really impressed with how this was going and seeing the benefit to all those attending. So hence my invite and this interview. It is really inspiring seeing everyone progressing so well...if a little painful... seeing them achieve in a few years what took me more than a decade! --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/DALL·E-2024-11-04-17.12.22-An-abstract-symbolic-representation-of-a-journey-through-spiritual-practices-including-elements-like-energy-flow-meditation-and-enlightenment.-The.jpg) **PAA: Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background. Please share about any other practices traditions you are involved in and how they benefit.** Hello! My spiritual journey started in 2014, but it was only last year that I discovered Hermeticism. Prior to that, there were really three chapters: qigong, vipassana and pentecostalism. Qigong was the first esoteric practice I explored seriously. I got some very interesting energetic experiences from it but I couldn't figure out how to connect it to my spiritual life more broadly. That spurred me on to study Buddhism and vipassana in particular, which was my deepest foray into meditation prior to starting the Master Course. I didn't understand at the time why the deity practices of Buddhism existed and so I ignored them, which led me to overdoing the akashic practices of that tradition and had me in a very nihilistic mood for a few years around that time. I was searching for something to pull me out, which led me to my first real exposure to nondual light and divinity via pentecostal Christianity. This lifted me out of my nihilistic funk, but I was still experiencing energetic phenomena and folks in that tradition generally are loathe to talk about it let alone provide a good map of how to engage with it. Thus, I kept searching, which led me to Hermeticism. So that background covered three levels of the five-level map of Hermetics. With respect to the other two, just for the sake of completeness, I'd have to say my wife was my big initiator into the astral realm. She's an artist, and has helped me attune to that world in a way I was somewhat oblivious to previously. And then finally, in the mental realm, I've been fortunate to have a couple of great mentors who have trained me on how to orient to and seek gnosis. But Hermetics and training the SixtySkills in particular is really my primary practice at the moment. **PAA: I know you from the Sixty Skills Discord, was it Franz Bardons teachings that brought you into contact with Sixty Skills?** It was actually the reverse, where SixtySkills helped bring me in contact with the reality of what Franz Bardon was teaching. I purchased IIH last year as I knew it was a classic of Western esotericism, but found it difficult to follow. Sixty has said it's about on the edge of intelligibility for the average practitioner today without an interpreter, and I certainly found that to be true, so I set it aside for the time being. At that time I was studying the work of John Michael Greer who had written something about egregores, which led me to the work of Mark Stavish. Mark and SixtySkills were on a Bard Inn podcast (highly recommended!) and I was immediately intrigued by what SixtySkills was saying. I decided to attend Mark's IHS Conference in June and had a chance to ask Sixty a few questions. He told me to practice building the ball, and my Master Course journey went from there! **PAA: Did you find Vacancy of Mind challenging? This has often been a brick wall for many in the wider Franz Bardon community.** That one is challenging for me, but strangely enough the first practice of watching thoughts without touching them is even more difficult for me than keeping thoughts at a distance. What I found really helpful with vacancy of mind was to stick with Mark Rasmus' recommendation to build platforms of mastery with the exercise, even if short - starting with two seconds, then working up to 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 2 minutes and moving on from there. For me there are two steps to getting it right - relaxing into the mental frequency of vacancy of mind (after Rasmus, I think of this as applying a water quality) and then generating the willpower to stay there (a fire quality). **PAA: Does visualization come easy to you or has it been a challenge to meet Bardons standards and those of the Sixty curriculum?** Visualization doesn't come so easy to me but practicing the SixtySkills curriculum has helped quite a bit with this. I find the sense training exercises fascinating. If I had to rank my proficiency with holding the sense object in mind, it would go touch, sound, sight, taste, smell - smell is a really tough one for me. > The experience of silence that I can achieve there is something I've only been able to touch a few times in my 10-year meditation career prior to finding SixtySkills, and now I can experience it daily with the equilibrium practice. **PAA: Now I always like to ask about people's experience with Depth Point - this for me is where things start to get more serious within Initiation into Hermetics. Anything you can say about this?** This isn't a practice that I've gone super deep with in terms of the Depth Point of other objects, but going into my own Depth Point via equilibrium has felt like a real milestone. The experience of silence that I can achieve there is something I've only been able to touch a few times in my 10-year meditation career prior to finding SixtySkills, and now I can experience it daily with the equilibrium practice. **PAA: I discovered you from within the Sixty Skills Discord, as you started an informal get together on the weekends to go through the exercises. This has been very popular and I think you have been doing a great job. What inspired you to start doing this and what benefits do you see from group work?** The first inspiration was the lessons that SixtySkills hosts on Sundays, which have allowed me to get direct transmissions of the skills as well as hear answers to my own and fellow practitioners' questions. The second was a Mark Rasmus comment that group training should constitute 25 percent of one's practice time (the "water element of practice"). I am naturally an introvert but it has been a ton of fun to train with and learn from other practitioners. It also helps keep me honest with my solo practice and study - I know that if we're going to cover a level on Saturdays, I need to have trained it the prior week! **PAA: How has the physical work of the magnetic and electric lines of force impacted your training? ** This was definitely a weakness of mine coming in - as Sixty has said, it's something that gets left out of a lot of systems. The emphasis in the course has reinforced my commitment to body training - right now I'm doing four body training sessions a week between gym, runs and E&M lines practice. (As an aside, I recently did a run while running the fire element, which gave a surprising boost to my time.) I've also been experimenting with Mark Rasmus' elastic force system to get some additional grounding in the lines of force. > There's a lot of attention in the community on putting in the 40 hours of elemental work in order to start practicing equilibrium, and I would say personally, that effort was very much repaid. **PAA: I know you are not through the curriculum just yet but can you share any big breakthroughs or challenges you have faced?** I've experienced the truth of what Bardon wrote in IIH - "I urge everyone to read the entire theory in detail before proceeding to practice … otherwise, failure will result." The implication is that if you are a meditative practitioner without access to good theory, you aren't going to get much of anywhere, and I spent a lot of the last ten years in what felt like treading water on my path. Thus, given the comprehensiveness of the SixtySkills curriculum and theoretical backing, just finding it in the first place felt like a massive breakthrough. As the Big Lebowski might say, it ties the room together. So many of the frameworks have been critical in helping to contextualize my experiences, development and goals. For example, there's confusion in the spiritual world about whether something relates to the path of manifestation / service or the path of enlightenment, so the clear naming of that in this system was revelatory for me. From a practice standpoint, I would say the big breakthrough has been reaching equilibrium. There's a lot of attention in the community on putting in the 40 hours of elemental work in order to start practicing equilibrium, and I would say personally, that effort was very much repaid. **PAA: Are you solely focused on the IIH/Master Course Curriculum now or are you also working with Kabbalah/Evocation?** I am fascinated by the letters, but other than the mother letters, I haven't yet started practicing them. Currently my practice goals are focused on deepening equilibrium to better stabilize my experience of akasha and attain nondual light as well as deepening my ability to work with the astral layer of existence in my path of manifestation / service. **PAA: Lets talk about practice time and schedule - what does a normal day look like for you? Especially as within the discord many are working their way towards the 100-hour mark with the elements before starting on the power aspect of the elements with standing work.** I don't have the most consistent practice schedule as I run a small business, but on a good day I'm getting in 30-45 minute practice sessions in the morning and evening. Looking at my Insight Timer stats for the last twelve weeks, I've averaged 53 minutes of practice time per day. My goal is to get this closer to 90 minutes to accelerate my development, but the good news for folks who don't have a ton of time is that you can get real results in I would guess as little as 30 minutes a day, and then you can let the successes build your resolve to train harder. As Bardon says in IIH, the system is designed for busy people. And as Sixty says, train hard and be well! **PAA: Any tips you have for those working on IIH? ** I'm very thankful for the community that you've cultivated at PAA and would encourage everyone to take advantage of the opportunity to connect with the amazing teachers and practitioners in it. There's an amazing range of experience - longtime Bardon practitioners, martial artists, healers, traditional magicians, folks with deep spiritual practices. At the same time, there's a unifying spirit to the community of wanting to train hard to advance on the path and a willingness to help each other with the work that I haven't found anywhere else. Another tip - I've loved keeping a journal. Our rational minds can be so good at convincing ourselves that we aren't making progress, and the journal has the receipts to prove otherwise. **PAA: Anything else you would like to add? ** Please find me on Discord at "Jenneke_of_Exile" to talk SixtySkills/IIH or join the Zoom practice group on Saturday mornings! We're working through the ten levels of SixtySkills and I suspect will circle back to level one again around the new year. **PAA: Thank you very much for your time, I look forward to catching up with you again in the future. ** --- ## Resources [About – markrasmus.org](https://markrasmus.org/about/) [Elastic Force Chi Kung - Course 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elastic-force-chi-kung) [Home - SixtySkills](https://sixtyskills.com/) [Sixty Skills Master Course: Expediting Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics - Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-master-course-expediting-franz-bardons-initiation-into-hermetics/) [Sixty Skills Interview with Phil Rice](https://youtu.be/eFyRdKanOiI?si=JL6BvJ7pObJx5IZB) ---