Hi Little Human,

I felt sometimes that it can be useful for me to actually add up more steps, for example do a mantra "O" outloud in the beginning of the practice helping me to relax deeper and to be more intuitive, rather than to rely on intellect.

I think that retrospection in the beginning of that practice is like a warm-up to prepare for the rest of it, as well as it helps me in psychoanalysis by gathering relevant information.
Sometimes I retrospect how a target ego manifested during a last day, last week, in a specific circumstances, etc.

Also doing retrospection well helps me to stay better detached from the mind later in the practice. From the relaxed state it can generate an impusle not to let my mind keep dragging me into past "non-digested impressions", but rather go to the "cave of subconscious with light" under conscious control and with divine guidance.

All the best,

Hi vadim, I like that.

For me, Little Human, there aren't really many steps to it, it's just relaxing and then retrospecting. The hard part is concentrating on those two things though.

Hello Ltltle Human,

The retrospection is only used to get us into the practices and kind of give us a little flavor of th ego before we start really analyzing it. When we retrospect we should do it very quickly without getting caught up in the ego that we are trying to observe. We need to just literally see the ego in different situations and move on. This way we don't get identified with it.

I also would recommend to ask this question in the Gnostic Wisdom forums as not everyone on public forums knows about the practice. And you also can get an answer from teachers which I find can be quiet helpful.

All the strength,

Stas

I think there is a sensible chronological sense to the meditation steps particularly when practising together as a group and then practising individually.
Perhaps my OCD tendencies are showing here!

Best wishes
Jackie

Hi LittleHuman,

I just wanted to say that there is a movie on Belzebuub's website where he talks about this practice. It is in "A Weekend Meeting 2008" and is called 'Observation, concentration & mediatation for self-knowledge'.

It's interesting that we all seem to have different opinions about the important parts of the practices. It's easy to see we are all still very falible. I can't say that I've perfected the technique by any means, but I can say that the retrospection is critical and, if done correctly, quite natural. I actually forgot about the meditation on the ego for a while, until I found that I was doing retrospection already when I would arrive at difficult egos. I've found the retrospection to be especially important because it shows how a small detail feeds a larger ego that manifests with more force later on. When you do meditation on an ego correctly, you will notice that 'those big egos that come out of nowhere', don't actually come out of nowhere, there is a lot of buildup (which is why it's good for big ego-ourbursts). With gnostic practices, I find that I'll get different things out of the same practice at different times, so keep at it. Not to say that it's harmful to sit and watch different egos that come up, but that's a different practice.
Keep in mind that these practices are ones that have worked for the masters at every step of their path, and were given by masters. A student once asked Master Rabolu which practice was best for astral projection, and he responded that they were all good, every one of Samael's practices worked, if the proper concentration was applied. If you do the practice well, focused, and with sincerity, there will be results.
All the best,
-J