The page Start Here says plainly that most people who begin a practice will stop within a month. Of those who continue past the first month, many stop within a year. Some teachers who have watched newcomers for many years estimate that no more than one in ten is still practicing a year after beginning. This is not a judgment on the nine. It is a description of what any serious discipline asks.
This page is for the tenth, and for the nine who may come back. It gathers what practitioners who have kept a practice for many years say about doing so.
Why Most Stop
The reasons people give for leaving the path are few, and they recur.
- The name is too heavy. The left-hand path carries a reputation, and the practitioner finds that they are not willing to carry it.
- Results were expected without investment. A practice approached as a vending machine is abandoned when it does not dispense.
- Fear. Something in the work, or something learned in childhood about work of this kind, sends the practitioner back to where they started.
- The first fire burns out. The excitement of the beginning carries a practitioner for weeks. When it fades, nothing has been built to replace it, and the record, the stillness, and the study lapse one by one.
- Freedom without focus. A path with no curriculum can drift. Without aims of their own, practitioners stagnate.
Every one of these is an ordinary human difficulty, and none of them is a sign of unworthiness. The second coil, the Ground, exists to meet the last two.
Four Stages of Learning
Some teachers describe the learning of any part of the practice in four stages, which apply equally to a meditation, a ritual, or a body of reading.
- Rote. The practitioner can do it, as one might know which button to press, without knowing why it works or what it does.
- Understanding. They know what it means, and why each part is there.
- Application. They can use it for their own purposes, in their own circumstances.
- Correlation. They can carry the principle beyond the case they learned it from, and recognize it in new situations. At this stage, they say, the knowledge has become one's own.
The stages are not climbed once. Applying something sends the practitioner back to understand it better, and every new correlation changes what was understood. The model also answers a question beginners often ask: when have I finished learning this? The answer is when you can find it in places nobody showed you. It is a good test, and it is one that only the practitioner can apply.
Reason Before Ecstasy
Some practitioners insist on an order of study: first the basics, then the history of esoteric thought, then science and the habits of critical thinking, and only then the irrational, the ecstatic, and the extreme. Their reason is simple. A practitioner should know how their own mind works before they set out to disturb it. The Order would put it in the words of its fourth tenet, Will Answers to Reason, and would add that the order of its own primer is the same: the record and stillness come before any working.
Aptitudes
Practitioners find, over time, that they are better at some parts of the work than others. One reads the mirror easily and cannot learn the cards. One keeps a flawless record and cannot sit still. Several teachers give the same advice about finding one's aptitudes: try many things, briefly, and then commit to one for a season. Exposure without commitment produces a collector. Commitment without exposure produces a specialist who chose by accident.
The best guide, many say, is to ask what you love. What you would do without being asked is likely to be where your practice belongs. And some aptitudes never come, however hard they are worked for. That is information, not failure.
It is worth saying that magic is not required. The Order's five disciplines are the record, study, stillness, the working, and the nightside, and some practitioners find that their practice lives almost entirely in the first three. Others find that their real practice is not occult at all: teaching, writing, making art, caring for people others have abandoned, gathering people together, or simply the patience to treat others decently when it would be easier not to. A practitioner whose discipline makes them more tolerant, more honest, and more useful has a practice, whether or not they ever light a candle.
Consistency
The page Designing a Working says that the secret of any craft is reliability. Across a life, the same principle means that higher work is built on lower work that is already reliable, and the practitioner who has kept ten minutes of stillness every day for a year has something that no single great working can give. First Workings shortened its daily exercise from twenty minutes to ten in its second edition for exactly this reason: a practice that is kept is worth more than a practice that is abandoned.
Plateaus
There are long stretches in which nothing seems to change. Practitioners who have come through them report two things. The first is that change was often happening out of sight, and became visible only later, in the record. The second is that patience cannot be asked for, only exercised. Some teachers warn practitioners not to pray for patience unless they are ready for the trials by which it is learned.
The temptation on a plateau is to force the result: to add workings, change methods, or push harder. Practitioners who have done this describe it as forcing a square peg into a round hole, and say that it leads only to backtracking. The better course is to keep the discipline, record the plateau honestly, and read the record at the monthly review. A plateau that appears in the record is far less discouraging than one that exists only as a feeling.
Dry Seasons
Practitioners who feel themselves in relationship with a figure, a spirit, or a god report seasons in which the relationship falls silent: prayers unanswered, workings flat, nothing felt for weeks. Practitioners who believe in no such figure report the same seasons in other terms, as times when the practice seems to have stopped working.
The advice they give is remarkably similar. Some compare the silence to the signal of an old television with an antenna: adjust it, slowly, and keep listening, and it returns. Others observe that the silence usually begins when life becomes too busy to listen, and that the first question to ask is whether the practice has quietly lapsed. Several say the same thing in one sentence: it is not terminal. Keep the record through the dry season, so that you can see afterward how long it lasted and what ended it.
Retreat
Practitioners of every current recommend periodic withdrawal: a stretch of time given entirely to solitary practice, away from groups, conversation, news, and even books. Some call it a chamber of reflection. Practitioners who return from such a retreat often bring back the same lessons: that they had been talking too much, that silence is acceptable and one does not always need to be doing something, and that a solitary practice owes no one an explanation.
The last lesson deserves emphasis. A practitioner who withdraws from a group, a circle, or a correspondence for a season owes no one a reason. A group that will not accept "I am taking time away" has shown something about itself, and the page Working With Others says what.
Some practitioners keep a different kind of retreat: a single night alone outdoors, on a night of their choosing, with the telephone switched off and nothing else brought from ordinary life, in a quiet place by water or on high ground. The aim is to hear one's own voice without any other in the way. Practitioners who keep this vigil give it a stop rule, which the Order would make stricter: if what arises is terror, or any voice or presence that cannot be told apart from ordinary perception, end the vigil, go home, and follow the chapter When to Stop in First Workings. The Order would add three conditions: that the place be safe and lawful, that someone know where you are, and that you write the record before you sleep.
Withdrawal is also a part of the practice in another sense. First Workings says that stopping is not failure, and that the serpent rests in winter. A practitioner who sets the work aside for a season and returns to it has not left the path.
Without Guilt
Many practitioners come to the left-hand path from upbringings in which guilt weighed heavily, and a surprising number of them rebuild the same guilt inside their new practice. A missed day of stillness becomes a sin. An imperfect ritual becomes a failure to be confessed. The record becomes one more measure by which to berate oneself.
The record is not a confessional. A missed day is written down as a missed day, and the next day the practice resumes. Words mispronounced in a working, a candle that would not light, a meditation spent entirely on a shopping list: all of these are ordinary, and none of them requires anything but an honest note. The practitioners who have lasted longest tend to say the same few things. A missed day is not a failure, and neither is a season of rest. Approach the practice each time as though it were the first. Expect nothing, and notice everything.
Novelty and Accumulation
Two habits pass for progress and are not. The first is novelty: moving from figure to figure, system to system, and book to book, each new one exciting for a month. The first coil names this as its danger. The second is accumulation: gathering tools, books, courses, and certificates in place of practice. The page The Altar describes it. Both are cured by the same thing, which is to choose one practice and keep it long enough to be changed by it.
A Life's Length
Practitioners who have kept at the work for decades say that one may study for a lifetime and still feel like a beginner. They do not say it as a complaint. The work of self-initiation has no end, and the coils are passed through many times. What changes over a lifetime is not that the practitioner arrives, but that they come to know, from their own record, how the work goes for them: how long a plateau lasts, what ends a dry season, which practices they return to, and which they have outgrown.
They add one more piece of advice, which may be the most useful on this page. Great things come to those who not only wait, but act while they wait.