What a technique is for

You know your body’s schedule. By four in the afternoon the lower back is tight enough to name the chair, the screen, the third meeting. You have tried the things that come with a name: the microcosmic orbit with light descending the spine, Regardie’s Middle Pillar with the willed image of light going down, Welz’s heaviness and warmth repeated six times until the hand feels heavy enough to be true. You have sat with them on waking and before sleep. They do something — the shoulders unclench, the counting pulls the mind out of the spreadsheet, a sitting that was going to be a fight turns into fifteen minutes of a held thing. You know, in the body, what a technique carries.

It carries your breath into a rhythm your body has not yet found on its own. It carries a relaxation that starts in the jaw and finishes in the shoulders. It carries attention the way a carried weight carries its own heaviness: once you are holding it, your hands are full and your mind is no longer a room with an open door. It carries a body-level change, measurable as warmth or a slackening. Four things. You can prove all four at four o’clock in your own kitchen.

And the corpus, which names the practice of magical workings, does something different with breath.

The procedures the corpus shows

The corpus does not demonstrate one technique. It demonstrates several — breath, crystal healing, green-ray routing, dream-recall — and none of them is offered to be kept. Each is instrument-bound and service-bound, appearing only when the working needs it. The instrument’s own voice asks for it, the group obeys, and then it is over.

Take, then, the crystal and feel your polarized and potentiated balanced energy channeled in green-ray healing through your being, going into and activating the crystalline regularity of frozen light which is the crystal. The crystal will resound with the charged light of incarnative love and light energy, and will begin to radiate in specified fashion, beaming, in required light vibrations, healing energy, focused and intensified towards the magnetic field of the mind/body/spirit complex which is to be healed.

As the green-ray center becomes more brilliant, and we would note this brilliance does not imply over-activation but rather crystallization, the energy of the green-ray center of the body complex spirals twice; firstly, clockwise from the green-ray energy center to the right shoulder, through the head, the right elbow, down through the solar plexus, and to the left hand.

it is only for a trained and disciplined observer to have reasonably good recall of the dreaming. This faculty may be learned by virtue of a discipline of the recording immediately upon awakening of each and every detail which can be recalled. This training sharpens one’s ability to recall the dream. The most common perception of a mind/body/spirit complex of its dreams is muddied, muddled, and quickly lost.

Each follows the same shape: a procedure the vessel needs, applied to the working at hand, never taught as a portable discipline.

The breath procedures below follow that same pattern.

I am Ra. I greet you in the love and in the light of the One Infinite Creator. Before we begin may we request that a circle be walked about this instrument and let then each of the supporting group expel breath forcibly, approximately two and one-half feet above the instrument’s head, the circle then again being walked about the instrument. [This was done as directed.] I am Ra. We appreciate your kind cooperation. Please recheck the alignment of perpendicularity and we will begin. [This was done as directed.] I am Ra. We communicate now.

This is a working procedure, the same family as checking the alignment of perpendicularity. It is done twice, because the working itself began broken. The first walk of the circle was slightly irregular — the words of the sound complex vibratory mechanisms came in wrong — and something took the opening and began working on the instrument in trance. So the circle was walked again, the breath driving the intruding thought-form out, and then walked once more.

So the technique is not a meditation you adopt. It is a repair, repeated on sight. The working began broken, an entity took the opening, and the circle was walked again with the breath of righteousness:

This instrument was under specific psychic attack at the time of the beginning of the working. There was a slight irregularity in the words verbalized by your sound complex vibratory mechanisms in the protective walking of the circle. Into this opening came this entity and began to work upon the instrument now in trance state, as you would call it. This instrument was being quite adversely affected in physical complex distortions. Thus the circle was properly walked. The breath of righteousness expelled the thought-form and the circle again walked.

This entity was, as your people put it, looking for a target of opportunity. The missed word was a chance occurrence and not a planned one. We might suggest in the, shall we say, future, as you measure space/time, as you begin a working be aware that this instrument is likely being watched for any opportunity. Thus if the circle is walked with some imperfection it is well to immediately repeat. The expelling of breath is also appropriate, always to the left.

There is no second direction, no variation on the left. From right to left. A person could repeat this exact shape a hundred times and never have a practice, because every repetition answers a trouble that came in first.

The following request, the breath being sent above the instrument’s head from right to left:

It is as you have just accomplished, the breath being sent above the instrument’s head from its right side to its left.

The following answer says the expelling of breath is also appropriate, and always to the left. That instruction is answered here, done:

The yellow-ray— We must correct ourselves. I am Ra. Please expel breath across this instrument’s chest area. [This was done as directed.]

The following answer repeats the same shape across the breast, right to left:

I am Ra. Please expel breath over the breast of the instrument from right to left. [This was done as directed.] I am Ra. That is well. Your previous supposition is indeed roughly correct. We might also note that we, in forming the original images for your peoples, were using the cultural commonplaces of artistic expression of those in Egypt. The face is drawn to the side most often, as are the feet turned. We made use of this and, thus, wish to soften the significance of the side-long look. In no case thus far in these deliberations, however, has any misinterpretation or unsuitable interpretation been drawn.

The one who follows says, the body complex of the instrument was injured and the place of working was not at its usual level of protection, so we used your breath to cleanse the environment, which was at risk:

This instrument is unaware of the method used to contact Ra. However, its desire was particularly strong, at the outset of this working, for this working to transpire. Thus it inadvertently was somewhat premature in its leaving of the yellow-ray, physical body. In this state the object was dropped upon the instrument which you call the tie-pin microphone. The unexpected contact caused injury of the chest muscles and we would advise some care depending from this working to avoid stress so that this injury may heal. There is a metaphysical component to this injury and, therefore, we wished to be quite sure that all portions of the environment were cleansed. Since this place of working has not its usual level of protection we used your breath to so cleanse the environment, which was at risk.

The last breath instruction is the briefest of them, and it is the one that names the condition for all of them — the instrument’s body, not the reader’s life:

Please expel breath over this instrument’s breast.

The following working, the environment was not at its usual level of protection, so the answer says we used your breath to cleanse the environment, which was at risk. That is the honest shape of the corpus’s procedure: a remedy for a specific trouble, not a discipline to keep. It is offered because the instrument is exhausted, because a working is underway, because a place of working has lost its usual protection. None of those conditions is a person’s general state. When the instrument’s body is exhausted, that is the instrument’s body, not the reader’s life.

The material names the breath, gives the anatomy, and supplies procedure — height, direction, intensity — but only as it is bound to the working. A reader who has done a technique before will supply the rest without noticing they have: imagine a current descending the body, imagine it returning, imagine the circuit closed. The corpus supplies none of that. It supplies a direction and a risk and a done, and the reader who supplies the rest is borrowing the technique from somewhere else and calling the corpus the teacher.

What a technique can carry

Outside this corpus the same breath is made into a practice. Israel Regardie, The Art of True Healing, puts it in the Middle Pillar line: rhythmic breathing with the willed visualisation of light descending through the centres, then circulation round and up, so that every single cell, every atom, every organ is vitalised by the same stream. He begins with a relaxation of every tissue throughout the body before attempting the technique at all — so the Middle Pillar line is not a discipline that rushes in. Karl Hans Welz, Autogenic Training: A Practical Guide in Six Easy Steps, has heaviness and warmth, six basic formulas each repeated about six times: my right arm is heavy, my right arm is warm, my heart beats calmly and regularly, my breathing is calm and regular. Schultz’s method, repackaged as a self-help primer.

These are real. They are reproducible. They are benign. Regardie says the dynamic stream vitalises every department; Welz says the practice causes a state of relaxation so deep that fifteen minutes of training can make up for a sleepless night. You can do the Middle Pillar in your kitchen, and by the fourth minute your hands feel warm, your counting has a shape, your attention is a held thing. That is a technique carrying four things: rhythm, relaxation, body-level change, attention. I name them ours — the fourfold catalogue is not the material’s. But the phenomenon is not mine to doubt: a reproducible technique carries exactly those four things, and no more, for the length of the practice.

This essay is not a hit-piece on technique. If it were, it would not say that Regardie and Welz are real and useful. The corpus simply does not stand behind the same claim.

What a technique cannot carry

What it cannot carry is what the corpus does have: the account of healing as an activity of the indigo ray — those who heal and teach and work for the Creator, radiant and balanced in the record’s own words — which no sequence of steps can produce.

those who heal, teach, and work for the Creator in any way which may be seen to be both radiant and balanced are those activities which are indigo ray.

Healing here is not a descent and circulation. It is a state of the one who heals: radiant and balanced. A being-state, not a thing drawn in and carried out and carried through the body. This library reads 39.10 as defining the domain of healing rather than measuring the healer’s condition — it says that those who heal, teach, and serve the Creator are operating in the indigo ray. The corpus’s own record on the healer’s state is 66.15, which says the crystallized healer has no will of its own.

To specifically answer your query the crystallized healer has no will. It offers an opportunity without attachment to the outcome, for it is aware that all is one and that the Creator is knowing Itself.

The technique can bring your hands to warmth. It cannot make you radiant.

And the boundary is not a failure on the technique’s side. The Middle Pillar line knows exactly what it is for: Regardie says it is for bringing power and spiritual energy into the system by the psycho-spiritual centres, and then asking, how best are we to use it. He answers with circulation and then with relaxation as the precondition. He never claims the technique makes the one who draws it radiant; he claims it vitalises every cell, every atom, every organ. That is a real claim, and it is a boundary. The corpus makes a different claim about the same breath, and neither one is doing the other’s work.

This is the practice-side complement to the reading of essay 82, healing as descent and circulation, which owns that comparison. Here I claim only what a reproducible technique carries, and what it cannot.

Figure 01

One technique carried

The count, said honestly

The archive is not clean on the word breath, so I am not going to pretend the scan gives a number I can publish without the method. A raw case-insensitive scan for breath over the whole archive — 2,632 records across 106 sessions — returns the word in 19 hits across 15 records. Some of that is atmosphere: the mental/emotional distortions are lessened by vigilance against humidity in the atmosphere breathed. Some is the tape-recorder noise, the cover pulled over the instrument, the request in the middle of a transcript to repeat the opening sentences and the breath expelled. And 88.23 gives the breath first drawn at birth, which is about incarnation, not a practice.

The Ra-side instruction passages I actually read in full are eight: the four in session 62 (62.0, 62.1, 62.7, 62.9), the three in session 103 (103.2, 103.15, 103.16), and 104.20, where the instrument is asked to expel breath over the breast. Every one of them is instrument-bound and service-bound. The number of breath instructions in the corpus is small, and every one is a remedy for a working, not a discipline for a life. The provenance of this essay carries all eight ids, and the prose renders all eight — the count is a presence claim over the archive, and the manual count of passages read is the one the argument actually depends on.

The vessel, not the practice

So here is what a technique is for, in this corpus: it is the thing the working reaches for when the vessel is compromised, and it is never kept as the work. This library reads the corpus as offering no manual — a portable, self-contained set of instructions — because what it offers are directions bound to the working: a direction (62.0, 103.2), a risk (103.16), and a done (104.20). The procedures named above are real and reproducible, but each is answered by the condition of the vessel, not a method to keep.

When the practice ends and the lights come on, what is left is not a practice of healing. It is whether, in the next hour, the one who lives was radiant and balanced. The corpus calls that indigo ray. The book calls it a force distributed to every part of the body, named and paraphrased here from Regardie. Both are true; neither is the other’s account. You can sit with your lower back and breathe in a rhythm you make up, in the kitchen, at four o’clock. That is ours. Whether it makes you radiant — that is what the material measures, and that it does not teach.