Your Book of Mirrors

Book of Shadows Lesson
* Part 3 *

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

There's another book I'd recommend for your journey into Wicca: a Book of Mirrors.  This is like a spiritual journal, where you…

*  write your spiritual, magickal, and psychic experiences,

*  keep track of miraculous encounters, epiphanies, and signs/omens that come to you,

*  note how you feel as you do the practices,

*  practice dream work,

*  journal your Reflections,

*  dialogue with the Divine[1],

*  record your divinations and readings (although personally I like to keep these in my daily journal),

*  anything in the nature of keeping track of your spiritual journey and experiences. 

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[1] A specific spiritual practice that you can read about here: How to Dialogue with the Divine  and Interpret Divine Guidance.

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Why Have a Book of Mirrors?

It's very handy.  This way you can immediately find that prediction you had 4 years ago, chart your intuition's increasing accuracy, keep count of how many signs the Divine has given you, and so on.  (These abilities will all come as a result of your practicing the lessons in this course.) 

The funny thing about working on a spiritual level is that the brain isn't designed to remember spiritual experiences!  Some will be burned into you forever, but even so the details get blurred.  This happens with all memories, of course, but it seems to be even more so when working with spirit.

For instance, there's this fascinating thing that happens when you dream.  Did you know that people have the ability to "dream forward" in time?  What that means is, you routinely dream about things that haven't happened yet.  I'm not making this up.  This is not quite the same as prophetic dreaming — you're not foreseeing what actually will happen, but what you will experience in the next day or so. 

This is confusing, so let me give you an example. 

One man dreamt that he was reading in a newspaper that said there was a volcanic eruption and 2,000 people died.[2]  The next morning, he read in his paper that there was a volcanic eruption, but 2,000 people didn't die in it… 200 did.  He didn't realise until later that he had misread the number; when he read the paper, he thought it said 2,000.  So his dream didn't predict what actually happened; it "remembered" what he thought happened. 

He dreamt about his day, which is ordinary enough, except when he dreamt about it, it hadn't happened yet!

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[2] This comes from a most fascinating book, An Experiment With Time (Studies in Consciousness), by J. W. Dunne.  I can't remember the exact details, but this gives the idea.  
It's a truly intriguing book with all kinds of dream experiments in it and instructions on how to learn to do them yourself.  sing it, I learnt to recognise (at least sometimes) when I'm dreaming forward myself.  I highly recommend it; it's one of my favourite books of all time (if you'll pardon the pun) 

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This is common to everyone, according to Dunne's studies, and happens perhaps daily.  Why, then, don't we know about it?  Because the brain is wired to simply not notice such glitches in our sense of time as an arrow, moving only in one direction.  Even when it's incredibly blatant.

What Does This Have to Do with a Book of Mirrors?  

One of the ways we can learn to detect this kind of thing is by keeping a dream journal, and then looking back at the end of a day to see if our dreams were about things that hadn't happened yet.

In the same way, if you regularly write down any psychic or spiritual experiences you have, you train your brain to recognise them, and you'll notice them more and more.  If you want to develop your intuition, psychic ability, and awareness of the Divine's guidance coming to you, this is a vital exercise.

So for a Book of Mirrors, you can use anything that'd be appropriate for a Book of Shadows: a spiral-bound notebook, a gorgeous tooled-leather handmade-paper specialty journal, or anything in between.

Optionally, the Book of Mirrors can be incorporated with your Working Book of Shadows and your ordinary daily journal if you prefer.

For purposes of this course, when the exercises say to take notes in your journal or Book of Mirrors, you can use whichever you prefer.

You don't really need any more detail on using a Book of Mirrors, so for the rest of this lesson we'll concentrate on getting your Book of Shadows up and running.

Continue from Book of Mirrors to Grimoires Part 4:
Starting Your Book of Shadows

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Find out more about this course:

A Year And A Day: 
53 Weeks to Becoming a Wiccan

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Continue with Book of Shadows 4:
Starting Your Book of Shadows