Copyright (C) 1998 by William Mistele. All rights reserved. 

How to Meet Gnomes

Preliminary Concerns

Usually you need to work with Franz Bardon's basic training for a year to
a number of years to prepare your mind for this form of contact.  Bardon
mentions it is important to not speak first to a new acquaintance among
the elements but rather to let them ask you a question.  This does not
prevent you from concentrating on connecting to them.
   Many individuals are already doing quite fine working with elemental
beings through a large variety of different methods and through different
training systems so anything I say is not particularly new.  I do wish to
make a few observations.
   Exposure to elemental beings and various astral realms my result in an
individual's aura becoming saturated with  those particular energies. It
is help to be able to sense these energies and to dissolve them when you
are no longer within those realms.  For example, you may want to breathe
out the energies going through each part of your body until you feel you
have completely returned to normal. It sometimes takes me up to an hour to
do this.  For this matter, it is also helpful to have some experience in
building up your vitality through such things as Tai Chi, yoga, pranayama,
breathing in energy, and so forth.  Magicians use energy the same way
shamans use ecstasy as they move between our world and the inner planes. 
   It is also important to be very centered within yourself on a mental
plane.  Centering is taught for example in Aikido.  What I would emphasize
is learning to concentrate with each of the five senses in the way Bardon
suggests.  That is, you visualize one thing and only one thing working
from a minute to much longer, e.g., five, ten, or fifteen minutes without
any distractions.  You do this with all of your senses.   Strong emotions
short circuit mental functioning and thinking.  To work with strange and
unfamiliar emotions, you need a lot of back up and mental clarity.
   On an astral level, it is important to become familiar with the four
elements as they function within human beings, within nature, and within
spirit.  In a lot of my writing, I try to explore the connections between
these levels of consciousness.   The important thing is to develop an
interpretative system so that you can recall and understand unknown
energies when you run into them.  After a while, you can compare
similarities and differences. You learn to draw fine distinctions between
various states of consciousness, energies, elementals, and so forth just
as you can between your own emotions and the personality traits of
friends. 
     And finally, it is important to identify in some way with divinity
when entering the invisible worlds.  Undines possess bliss outside the
normal range of human consciousness.  But all their magick and enchantment
is a dim reflection of divine love.  They just happen to be a lot easier
to contact and a lot closer to human consciousness than divinity.  
   The same for the other elemental beings.  For gnomes, time is nothing.
Ages are nothing. Eons are nothing.   They are the same old folks enduring
in whatever they do and time does not weary them.  Divine missions are
like that.   You work at things for many life times and never fail for
lack of enthusiasm or endurance.  I have written on this already in my
other essay introducing elemental beings so I won't belabor the point.
The important thing is that developing a divine identity within yourself
gives you a freedom and independence from the physical, astral, and mental
planes.  You need this basically to feel at home wherever you are in the
universe.  It is a great way to go.      



Methods for Contacting Gnomes

How do you get in contact with a gnome?  Is it like having a favorite
stone you call your own?  You go for a walk in nature and come upon a
stone which captures your attention and cries out for your hands.  The for
a few minutes each day you hold the stone between your palms and meditate.
Through the contact, you and the stone invoke the silence and the beauty
of the earth.  Then, like the crystal in a short wave radio you have
switched on, you can send and receive--you sense the vibrations and hear
the songs in mountains, minerals, and geologic ages long gone.
   Each nationality, culture, and set of folk legends have their own
variety of gnomes, dwarves, and earth elementals.  For goodness sakes, we
first hear about gnomes and dwarves in children's stories.  They are
friendly and charming or spooking and horrible depending on the legend.
Some individuals with a flair for astral perception can find a gnome of
this sort without any trouble.  Racial memories are like footprints that
are still fresh on the ground.  You can follow the tracks to meet who made
them even though those tracks are invisible to everyone else.
    Another route is called mental wandering.  Usually this is preceded by
practicing concentration exercises training your senses for six months to
a few years.  Then you drop your mind down into the ground and wander
around.  
   The procedure in this case is to use your imagination to increased your
weight so you feel dense, solid, and heavy.  You also reorient your time
frame.  Imagine for a moment you are the roots of a Redwood tree growing
downward for four hundred years. Gnomes enjoy games like this.  This kind
of relaxing and slowing the tempo down is a gnome's form of recreation.
   You might also try scanning the ground beneath you as if you have x-ray
vision. Out my window is Koko Head Crater standing eight hundred feet
tall.  Occasionally parts of the ridge circling the caldera break off and
tumble down to the floor of the valley.  
    But to see this crater as a gnome is to feel the ground still
rumbling.  It is to sense that sea of magma which tunneled up from the
depths with immense pressure squeezing and striving to press through the
cracks. A gnome sees the caverns which the magma baked black and the
labyrinth of corridors the tendrils of molten fire created.  And a gnome
sees the lava exploiting into the sky and the cinder cone growing.  When a
gnome touches a stone or lets black sand slip through his fingers, the
memory comes back so real it feels like it is still happening. 
       If you prefer a more academic approach for gaining rapport with a
gnome, you might try studying geology.  Then write a story as if you are
the thing you are studying--become the process of erosion, an underground
stream, a volcano refining gold and sulfur, or a geologic strata dreaming
of that its eons are just beginning, etc.  In the same vein, try writing a
journal as if you are a gnome magician.  Make an entry each day for what
you--the gnome--did to occupy your time. 
   Shall we give it a try?  Imagine you have a little lamp which lights
your path through the ground. Its very quiet, so quiet, I can hear, if I
listen carefully, the groaning of an earthquake which occurred twenty
years ago not far from Tucson, Arizona.  
    Are you ready to begin then?  Today I send my mind into the sands of
White Dunes in New Mexico.  Walking through these grains of sand feels
very sensual.  There is not much to see except the way the sands are
arrayed by the wind.  Constantly swirling and shifting, the dunes move
like waves.  
  There are layers within the sand folded with precision the way a snake
coils its body and places its head at the top.  But I am looking for
something new.  Ah, here is a sand dune that is different.  It is lighter
and delicately balanced.  Its form is fragile. Its slopes are poised to
fall down.  Its ridge is like the curves of the hips and thighs of a woman
ready to yield to the faintest caress of the wind.  Its center of gravity
is fluid and open to suggestion.  At another time, I would wait around
until that happens but not now. 
  I am off to Yosemite and into one of those granite cliffs also carved
with beauty.  Here I am now.  As I walk around, the quartz in the granite
sparkles in the light of my lamp like fire flies switching off and on in
the dark.  But what is interesting are the fractures in the rock.  Though
the cliff is solid, if you change the way you look you can see that the
fractures form different rooms in the granite.  The stresses of geologic
events have left here their memories.  
   The sand dunes are sensuous like waves on the ocean.  But this granite
is also in motion and changing.  It is like an iceberg which has broken
free to drift on the sea.  I can feel it eroding like ice melting.  It
shifts and turns.  It shakes and vibrates with the earthquakes and with
the mountains rising.  And the rain, like the river nearby, is relentless
and unending as its fingers press into any crevice searching for a place
to take hold, a brittle edge to snare and break.  
   But the granite really does not care.  The quartz and crystals in its
structure have a tone of their own.  You can almost hear a humming sound
like a slow, deep notes in the song of Enya called Boadicea..  These
granite cliffs are singing.  The song is not about being old or enduring.
The song is about having inner vision, of the light that appears within
you when you open your eyes to see it. The quartz glittering before my
lamps light has the cool and quiet solemnity of the stars shining in the
night. 
   Well, these are a few entries in my journal which I write having taken
on the form and perspective of a gnome.  You get the idea.  When you learn
to think, feel, and see as a gnome, you make the earth your home.  The
mountain, the valley, the limestone, and sandstone--they are full of songs
and poetry and their memories become your own.  Minerals, metals, and
gemstones--the light within them illuminates your soul.  
    Still, if you want to meet a gnome magician like Mentifil, you need to
use a slightly different procedure.  You need to think like an alchemist
who sees matter as embodying both form and emptiness.  Mentifil's mind
immediately perceives the origins and the probable end of anything that
has shape, weight, and form.  But more than this, he is interested in the
process of refining. He would take the various energies within nature and
blend them together until they form a quintessence--the purest and highest
substance.
      To do this, Mentifil studies the light and the electronic vibration
in minerals and elements.  He is not so interested in joining or dividing
atoms or separating electrons, neutrons, or protons. He likes to produce
the philosopher's stone which legend has it promotes longevity.  Sylphs
and the undines to not concern themselves with such things.  But the
gnomes who live in the earth are willing to share the secret of
immortality to a small degree.  
       The idea of alchemy, I know, taxes the mind and challenges reason.
It is an enormous and complex subject. But there are always short cuts if
you know how to look for them.  Take an emerald, ruby, an amethyst or any
stone or element.  Consider its qualities and its structure.  Ask
yourself, "What is this stone's inner essence?"  Then mediate on the gem
or element as if nothing else exists with a patience that embraces the
ages.  
     Or, to put it simply, you let your brain waves become one with the
stone as if you already perceive the answer and are just waiting for the
right words to describe it.  This will set the brain waves of your mind in
tune with Mentifil's mind.  After all, magick is just a lot of listening
and a little technique.  After you learn to listen, the technique is easy.
You draw a sigil or send a telepathic message.  Mentifil's aura is then as
near as someone sitting next to you on a plane or bus. 
   A more technical approach, of course, is to visualize Mentifil's sigil
without distraction.  A sigil to a magician is like a signature to a
handwriting analyst.  The curves, loops, dots, and lines paint an portrait
of an individual's personal qualities, his character, his strengths and
his weakness.  Mentifil's sigil is found in Franz Bardon's book, The
Practice of Magical Evocation.
   

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