While becoming a master of fate is more than likely something most won't fully experience in this incarnation there are at first glimpses and then sustained transformations that people experience when undergoing this practice.

Once you become consciously conversant with the baseline resonance of pride, anger, lust, fear, grief, and apathy their energy can be worked with as it is no longer viewed as ‘the other.’ When this happens a sort of homeostasis builds up and is emitted by the person when encountering these feelings. That’s not to say there are not times that they succumb to the circumstance but more oft than not they find themselves more in control.

The beauty about alchemy is that it gives results in a rather short period of time one does the practice and it either produces a shift in perspective or it does not. This is true irrespective of the work being in making a product for ingestion or an inner practice.

During a session with a student visiting relatives in Puerto Rico the sound of wild roosters and other birds was a noticeable cacophony. Upon reaching a certain state during the induction the birds feel silent and remained that way for the duration of the session about thirty minutes plus approximately another ten minutes as the sound built up to its former level.

Another student who had recently done an Ayahuasca ceremony and spent quite a few years practicing various mediation techniques had this to say. “I’ve done meditation before but this [Hermetic Work] was so intense like my body was going to explode, very very hot. This was the first time that I allowed myself to feel this. The temperature of my body changed. I felt vibration through my whole body from feet to head. I was so strong and powerful.”

The most evocative experiences though are those that show themselves in your burgeoning understanding of self as this student describes.

“I began my advanced inner work with the knowledge that I have a vast inner landscape that for most of my life had been invisible to me. Its very existence had eluded me. Through my initial training I was able to discover that there were aspects of myself that were hidden, such as my desire to control my life and manipulate my situations through various means, However, for the most part, I felt like I had discovered very little of this landscape.

After a few weeks into the advanced training, I learned what the work included, I was very apprehensive. There were many dark aspects of myself that were associated with labels, such as guilt, shame, terrible, evil, etc. These were comprised of experiences of my past that I had judged as absolutely terrible and never should have been. I had done my own work on these I suppose, but that work was that they would remain buried for the rest of my life, no one would ever know of them, and they would die with me. This was not a passing decision, but one that had been re-affirmed any time a memory related to them surfaced. Learning that the first part of the work was to bring these to light was almost more than I could bear.

As the work slowly moved from my past to current constructs, I was able through reflection and guidance, discover the synchronicity between what before appeared as an “outside situation” and its relationship to the beliefs within myself. I began to see that the things that I wish were different, were symbolic of something within myself. This brought a tremendous amount of growth as I began also accepting the inner parts of myself through accepting their outer counterparts as represented by my family, relationships, etc.”