We are welcoming today Antonio a practitioner of Franz Bardons system who is generously sharing his personal experience of the path. He has his own blog that I encourage you all to visit: TUNA blog – spiritual enlightenment thanks to Franz Bardon (tuna-blog.azurewebsites.net)
PAA: Welcome Antonio and thank you for joining us. Could you introduce yourself, your magical journey and how you came to be on this path of Franz Bardon’s teachings.
Antonio: Hi, first of all I want to thank you for this opportunity of sharing my current experience with other practitioners. I’ve been a materialist oriented for years, striving for career goals and for other people acceptance and judgement. I’ve been in contact thanks to a friend of mine with freemasonry in 2013. I joined in 2014, but I still was missing something in my life, I wanted something practical to learn, to experiment, and primary, to get results. I’ve read lot of books about modern magic, but somehow, I’ve missed the Bardon’s entire path for months until my brother, scholar on compared and East religions, gifted me the first Italian edition (first 90nties if I’m not wrong) of IIH. I felt like Colombo discovering America continent. My greatest obstacle of the first months (almost 6) was meditating. I never had any meditation before, and I also had some fear of meditation, as it was a sort of hypnosis where someone else from everywhere in the world could ever take control of my mind…. I will never miss the memory of my first real result in vacancy of mind: I was on a simple chair, and I was so scared of the feeling I needed some other week to have again the bravery of retry the practice.
PAA: From your blog you have lots of very helpful information. What do you feel are the main challenges that students face in the practice of Initiation into Hermetics?
Antonio: Well, I have a little idea of the main challenges beginning practitioners may face at the first steps thanks to Facebook groups. In my opinion the two biggest I see are laziness and over-thinking. Laziness occurs to people that think it is like in the movies. You read IIH and start firing fireballs…. And when this is not happening, they start saying it is too difficult, it is badly written, it is cryptic, I was not born to practice as “you”, where this “you” is always someone who shared his/her results, eventually without specifying the difficulties faced, the time spent, the sacrifices overcome, and so on. The second category (I repeat, IMHO) are the overthinkers. People who try to syncretize all the knowledge available in all books from all kinds of magic, from all kind of traditions and cultures and eventually written in totally different historical ages. People who, eventually, start caring about the color of vital energy years before also trying to do the first ever practice.
PAA: What has been the biggest challenge for you in your work with Franz Bardons material and how did you overcome it?
Antonio: I think the worst challenges I had to face was during step 4, between 2017 and 2019. Yep. Two years. I felt the loneliness of me as practitioner trying to balance my time between family, work and hermetic. The difficulty of practicing something (transfer of consciousness) that I found (at the time) deeply wrong (because I mis-understood the practice as spying people inner thoughts). I waited for months with some good and some (let say) relaxed practice until I met two corner stones of my path… I’ve found the help from Ray del Sole and I’ve made my first meeting with my HGA. I will not go into the details, obviously, buy I want to add that at the time, I almost daily asked for help (in terms of praying for). When I’ve found Ray, I was extremely happy because with his suggestions my practice advanced to step 6 in few months. It was in that time that I’ve made a strange (without memory) dream. The only think I remember is that I awaked in the middle of night with a very powerful “mission” I definitely needed to do. Rising up and write down a “name” on my journal. Then it was Ray who identified him as my HGA. Later I’ve made additional contacts, then I’ve started a beginner communication, and so on.
PAA: What advice can you give to those people who are perpetually on Step 1/2? Have they misunderstood the requirements of the step?
Antonio: Well, it seems I already addressed this question above. I will instead talk of the keys of the progress in IIH path. Practicing exercises like in a gym is useless. When you end step 1, you should start being powerful in mind also in the everyday life. You are now a meditator. The same happens with step 2, you should become a new person by starting the changing of yourself. In other words, IIH changes you. Is not a sort of workout. Until you will overthink, or be too lazy, or repulse the transformation that IIH should bring into your life, you will never advance further. I personally like the idea of considering those people the “Fools” as for the tarot card # zero. They have an idea of what there is (in the Universe), because they have now made a basic experience, and they’ve read IIH, but they are still on their “relaxed” way.
PAA: What steps have you enjoyed the most and got the most satisfaction out of completing?
Antonio: In few words, step 7 clairaudience to me has been the key to go further in any step or plane or whatever. Bardon wants we are our self-teachers. He wants we enlighten ourselves learning and practicing. But he also wants we have encounters, first with our HGA, and later with beings from planes, not as magicians from other traditions only to prove we’re powerful and “force” those beings doing something for your personal benefit. No. He wants we became friend with those beings. Friends and also, he wants we learn from them. Later we can use the same practice to talk with gods and to “read the mind” as we all know from Frabato novel. This is because, imho, clairaudience it the first of the ability of high level we need to master. Yep, clairvoyance is a great tool too, we can see auras and we can access to the symbolic world. Something of incredible importance. But without the ability to talk we’re less than halfway on our path to self-learn and self-enlighten.
PAA: I notice from your blog you share the same thoughts as I do about the importance of the depth point training. Can you talk more about this and how it shifts one practice at the start of the 2nd half of IIH.
Antonio: Space magic or akashic point magic is the key to get into a position of power with anyone or anything. I already made some examples of key tools or key practices we find during the path of IIH. These keys are not only important steps in the practice. They each change the practitioner and the practice also of other steps. In step 4 transfer of consciousness, we can feel the target, or transform into the target, or both and interchange the two experiences. But when we’re at step 5, and we do the transfer of consciousness using the deep point as an access door, we rapidly get into the real target. It’s like we get a short way to the core of the target.
PAA: What can you tell us about your work with the second and third books, PME and KTQ?
Antonio: I chose to not work at this moment with KTQ. I’ve made some practice to “try”, but I’ve never actually worked with KTQ because I already have a huge amount of work with PME and IIH. Working with PME is greatly a mystery to IIH practitioners who didn’t reached step 8 to try. I personally have used the magical authority only once. Because the quest I was having was requesting the use of such practice. I prefer asking, eventually talking. And getting to what I consider the primary goal. Friendship. I can recognize in my life and also in the life of other friends here on Earth the influence of the beings from this or other planes. When you start a friendship, or even when you simply met some of those beings, you’re already into their influence sphere. And things start to move differently from how normally happens on other (normal) people.
PAA: I notice from your blog you have returned to your religious practice in conjunction with IIH. What can you tell us about this? Was it like going full circle returning to some of the practices you did when younger prior to IIH?
Antonio: Eh, this is a complex topic. Yes, I’ve made a return to Christianity thanks to the experiences I’ve made with IIH. Obviously, my current participation into the Sunday mass is totally different from other people. I can feel the energies. I can see the “angels” involved into the ritual. I can feel and interact with Jesus. But this also created into me a powerful crisis. The call of the right-hand path in participating this was to a mass is definitely strong. It is easier. It is full of gratifications coming straight from a god. For instance, the feeling of getting into the grace. A sensation of “rightfulness” mixed to the feeling of proximity to a god. The love. And all the other feelings. But there are also issues into this path (I mean in Christianity). The duality is strong. There is a hidden pure positive energy that always try to fight the negative energy of super dense astral beings (commonly referred as demons – in modern meaning). I felt the strongest resistance from negativity in the time I mostly I got closer to Jesus. All that grace, all those great feelings, asked a price. The absolute purity. You can fail. You can’t absolutely give time and energies to any of your negativity. In this, Bardon’s path is definitely gentler. It gives you time (and tools) to transform. While in Christianity you have not time, as your mind get into any negativity, you miss the grace…. You flow away…. And to get back, you have to righteously maintain the purest mind and conduct of actions. Jesus is really the god of salvation. He said “only through me, you’ll find the salvation”. This is true, in the meaning that between all gods I know (I’m not an encyclopedia), He is the only one actually giving you salvation only asking for absolute giving to Him. I’ve tried this experience as an initiate, so with totally different abilities and knowledge from other people, and I’ve found all true. But I’ve found Bardon’s path more suited to my destiny.
PAA: Lastly is there anything else you would like to discuss or a message you would like to share with readers?
Antonio: I’d like to conclude with something from a friend who helped me into the edge of my most difficult moments with my path. Be serious in your work but never be hard on yourself. Find the time to celebrate your successes, also the smallest, because this path is seriously difficult and any success worthy of a celebration.
PAA: Thank you very much for sharing with us your journey.
