Liber Null makes you sit still first

Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null starts its practice with homework. Keep a diary. Sit still. Write down how it went.

The book was written as a sourcebook for the Illuminates of Thanateros. In the acknowledgments, Carroll thanks Ray Sherwin for helping make the first version available to the order's students in 1978. Sherwin wrote The Book of Results that same year. The two of them produced a revised version in 1981. Weiser put Liber Null and Psychonaut in one binding in 1987.

Chaos magic gets sold as a free-for-all. The syllabus reads like a lab manual. Its introduction calls the order's magic "an intensely practical, personal, experimental art." Experimental means you keep records.

The diary is the instrument

Liber MMM, the first syllabus in the book, calls the magical diary "the magician's most essential and powerful tool." Carroll wants a full page for each day. Record the time, the duration and the degree of success. Note what around you helped the work, or got in its way.

That is a lab notebook, and the lab is your head.

I take the diary as the real inheritance of the whole current. Spare supplied the sigil. Carroll supplied the habit that tells you whether the sigil did anything.

The diary does one more job. It stops you rewriting history. In six months you will remember the hits and lose the misses. The page keeps both.

Then you sit

The first exercise is motionlessness. Pick a comfortable position and hold it as long as you can. Watch the mind without following it. Carroll says not to settle for less than five minutes. At fifteen, you move on to slowing the breath.

Five minutes is humbling. You may find out you cannot do it yet. Log it anyway. You just took your first baseline. Any working that runs on focus runs on a component you have never tested.

Carroll also says to try not to blink, or move anything at all. He warns that a comfortable position may become agonizing, and his next word is "persist!"

Here I part ways with the text. Blink. Shift if you need to. Stop if something hurts. You are measuring quiet, and pain only measures pain.

A gate I would remove, an order I would keep

The book calls success with these exercises a prerequisite for any real progress with the next syllabus. In an order, that is a gate. I have no use for gates. Nobody has to sign off before you practice.

The ordering still holds. You cannot judge a result without a baseline. If you never measured your attention, you cannot say what a working did to it.

So sit first. Log it for two weeks. Read your own numbers before you aim anything at a goal.

The book's own warning

Liber Null's author's note says it was written for the serious occult student and contains powerful rituals. It tells anyone with heart disease, epilepsy or any chronic disease not to use the material. Take that at face value.

A diary and a still body are mild. Much of the rest of the book is not, and you can leave it shut.

Set a timer for five minutes tonight. When it goes off, stand up and write one line.