Introduction. System, Memorization, and Visualization are key factors in all “training for success,” no matter what the goal may be. 

Step One: the Route. Starting from your sleeping area, plan a route in your home and memorize it from your act of getting up from bed, slowly walking to the end destination, and then slowly returning to lie down in your bed. The route should be long enough so that you can establish six distinctive “Memory Stations,” preferably out of sight each from the next. You should actually draw a map of the route with the six stations indicated and described. Review that map at both the beginning and ending of the exercise described below.

Step Two: Observation of Details. Carefully study each memory station in turn for at least ten minutes each for ten days. The more distinct the characteristics of each memory station, the better. For that reason it will be helpful for you to place a differently colored object at each station. You can strengthen the sensual references by adding a distinct odor at each station—such as vanilla, chocolate, anise, peppermint, lemon, cinnamon, etc. If you can, secure a pitch pipe or other instrument and memory-record a distinctive sound at each station to recall each time you return to the station. Add something with a distinct feel—like pieces of felt, silk, leather, wool, glass, a sponge—and perhaps even something you can taste that is different at each station. Involving all your senses makes memorization easier and richer.

Step Three: Awareness Extension. Look at each memory station, smell, listen, feel, taste. And realize that you are looking not only with your physical eyes, but also your etheric and astral eyes. Likewise you are listening with you physical, etheric and astral “ears,” and so on. As an extension of this part of the exercise, try dreaming about each station, one at a time on successive nights.

Step Four: Visualization. At each station, close your eyes and visualize every detail while consciously experiencing it all with your other senses. 

Step Five: Reversal. Do dry runs over the route, stopping at each station to exercise your senses, and then turn around and do it all in reverse. See the entire route both going and returning, including the look and feel of the floor under your bare feet, the colors of the walls, passages through doorways, past windows or pictures on the walls, down and up any steps, and so on.

Step Six: Test & Verify. Next, test yourself by closing your eyes and “walking” the route from start to finish entirely in your memory, visualizing and sensing everything at the memory stations. Test and verify until you do it perfectly, without error. Make sure to take the same length of time for your memory trips as required for your “awake” trip.

Step Seven: Astral Walking. Do this action for several weeks, and then augment it by imagining, seeing and feeling  yourself getting up from bed or chair and walking the route, always from start to finish and back in your bed. When you fully feel that it is you making these trips, not an image, then attempt to transfer your consciousness to that etheric image of yourself. 

Endeavor to realize that the image is of your Etheric Double and you are seeing it with the “eyes” of your Astral Body, i.e. the body above the Etheric Double. Hold your consciousness in the Etheric Double and see it perform all the actions with the etheric counterparts of your physical arms and legs. At some point, you will feel your two bodies merge and you will be conscious of both the Etheric Double and the Physical Body at the same time. When you return to the starting point, be sure to transfer your consciousness back to the physical body. Always do these actions with awareness and completion. As long as you are incarnate in your physical body it is your home.

Step Eight: Dream Walking. As a final exercise, try to fall asleep while seeing yourself get up and walk the memory path. It should turn into a dream, and you should realize you are dreaming and then move on into astral consciousness.

Summary of Purpose & User Benefits: Through memory and visualization, you are integrating you physical, etheric, and astral faculties. By dreaming the same exercise, you are doing a controlled (and verifiable) astral trip.

Test & Verify. This concept is a vital part of your astral training. Astral consciousness includes the faculties of imagination and dreaming and untrained they lead to fantasy and even delusion. Magicians have various methods to verify their astral visions, but we start with this simple program: remember and record you dream, and compare with the physical experience.