One of the most important ingredients for working Magick is will power. You must train yourself to focus exclusively on the object of your desire - your reason for working the Magick.  It's not easy to focus on one thing or even one subject, to the exclusion of everything else. It can help to do a few exercises to achieve this focus. Here are three you can work with.

Prepare by sitting comfortably and breathing deeply for a few moments. Go through the process of breathing in the white light of purity and protection, and breathing out the blackness and negativity. I cannot stress enough how this needs to be done before every occult ritual. Find a large, color photograph in a magazine. It can be of a house or a scenic picture of a farm or just about anything. (For the moment, don't use portraits of people.) Sit and study the picture, seeing all the details. Look at the picture. See the shapes and colors, the sunlight and shadows. Now tear the picture in half down the middle and put the right half away for a moment. Lay the left half on a sheet of white paper and look at it. Look hard and see the missing  half of the picture materialize. (TIP: it helps to squint your eyes as you do this) See all the details of that missing half to the point where you could almost swear the picture was whole again. Then reverse the process: put the missing right half back, verify your vision of it, and remove the left half. Again, visualize the whole picture. The last step is to remove both halves and still see the complete picture in all its detail.

Now sit at a table and place a bowl of fruit or flowers in the center of the table. Having settled in your chair and done your light-building, look at the bowl of fruit; but don't just look at it - study it. See the arrangement of the fruit. Is the apple against the orange and separated from the pear? Where do the grapes fit in? See and study the whole arrangement of the fruit or flowers in the bowl, and notice the colors and the variations in color within each separate fruit. Note how the shadows fall, and how the different colors contrast. Study it in detail, until you can close your eyes and still see it perfectly. This is, in fact, what you are aiming for: to be able to close your eyes and still see every detail. Keep your eyes closed and picture the bowl and its contents. For the first few attempts you will probably need to flick open your eyes a couple of times to verify one aspect or another; but you'll soon get to where you can keep your eyes closed and see every detail. When you are able to do this, keep your eyes closed and imagine that the bowl is turning ninety degrees to the left. In your mind see the bowl turning, and note the arrangement of fruit from this new angle. Again, see the relationships of the various items, and the changes in the shadow patterns. When you feel you have a good picture, open your eyes and gently turn the bowl to see if you were correct. Keep that mental image in your mind and  compare the two. Correct your mental image where its wrong. Turn the bowl back to its original position and repeat the experiment. See if you now have the correct picture. Then go on to turn the bowl another ninety degrees, so that it is now as though you were looking at it from the opposite side of the table. Again, study it in every possible detail, and once again open your eyes and physically turn the bowl to see how accurate you were. Keep at this exercise until you can mentally turn the bowl of fruit to any angle and still see each and every detail and relationship.

More To Come... Check Back...