Importance of daily practice

I addressed the importance of daily practice in Words. In that book I've covered the vertical component in regards to its implication in detail and now I will address its horizontal one more. To save people time and effort, I will do so briefly and to the point.

Daily practice allows you to learn your ritual templates backwards. Constant repetition trains both your mind and your body to go through the motions involved in specific rituals. Daily practice does not involve working with spiritual entities and so the practitioner won't perform more advanced techniques during such sessions, but it can consist of preliminary ones such as casting the circle and addressing the divine. These two components are important regardless whether you're into lodge or grimoire stuff and repeating them over and over again will practically nail those procedures deep into your brain.

Other things such as lighting candles and incense for meditative purposes are also part of rituals. Therefore, establishing the right times to do them during practice sessions will prevent you from fumbling during actual rituals focused on contacting otherworldly stuff. Meditation too serves its role during rituals in which the operant wants to communicate with the entities he or she has called upon and so training the mind to slip into a meditative state smoother will allow one easier contact with those entities (although it depends how much time will pass before one's psychic senses develop to a degree to allow them to see and/or hear and/or sense spirits).

I for one have dropped daily practice since summer 2017 and instead perform a conjuration ritual each day, except when a huge Void of Course occurs or when the Moon is between 12* on either side of the Sun (except when the Moon is cazimi, in which case I'd do some invisibility work if the sign and aspects allow). Whenever I hit times I will not conjure spirits (for reasons we've covered in Asteria), I perform the preliminary work and then I commune with my Crowley-HGA and my chart angels. 

While you might be wondering wtf am I conjuring all those spirits for on a daily basis, I almost never lack ideas. Whether it's all sorts of experimentation, elixir or talisman work, curses, client work and so on, this keeps me occupied and so I ended up working with all many classes of spirits. As you can imagine, this allows me to go through the motions of the advanced stuff as well and so I find it relatively easy to conjure spirits success even during highly inhospitable conditions even if I still find such circumstances irritating and some times even experience headaches afterwards. And the success rate I encounter in such conditions is relatively the same as in the case of rituals done under less problematic circumstances. But enough about me!

Thing is we live in a world where everything happens at a fast pace and the ever expanding society allows people less room for peace and quiet as not everyone can go off grid and live in the middle of nowhere just to woowoo. Living in close proximity to busy traffic or loud neighbors is a common theme found in most countries. Additionally, the work schedule and different other mundane tasks allow for less time to perform rituals during the daily cycle, as one also needs to rest. As a result, many active occultists find themselves in a situation where they have to take advantage of a certain auspicious time and perform the ritual irrespective of the loud construction work outside and so on (whereas passive ones can read all the books they want during lunch break, for instance). 

You can imagine constant loud noises are very distracting and in many cases it's easy to break your concentration over the slightest sound so it's highly probable anyone who undertakes such an endeavor will be subjected to lots of stress. The stress comes from maintaining focus in order to go through each ritual step properly, but also from forcing one's self not to be dragged out of the state of consciousness they (are better off to) slip into during ritual. Not to mention the eventuality the person doing the ritual needs to communicate with the entity, in which case outside distractions can ruin the whole thing. 

Additionally, various unexpected events can arise and some of them can be traumatic. For example, receiving a call that relative has suffered a serious accident can be nerve-wracking to say the least, but an active occultist must act as soon as possible in order to reduce the damage and increase the victim's chances of recovery. As such, he or she must compose themselves irrespective of the amount of trauma they've experienced upon hearing the news and perform one or more rituals for dealing with the emergency. 

Other events, expected or otherwise, can cause tumult. Whether you get a late phone call from your boss telling you first thing in the morning you'll have to fly to another city or you had already planned a vacation abroad, changing your location means changing the environmental conditions both your mundane and magical states of consciousness have familiarized with. New surroundings can cause anxiety since there's no way of telling what interference you will encounter there during rituals, if any.

While constant daily practice does not guarantee the practitioner will reach a level that would allow them to "turn off" any interference from within and without for the entire length of their operation regardless of its kind and intensity, it will allow the person to push through all of that without too many errors. And even if they happen to make certain errors, they would still be able to get the entity to show up even if they can't see/hear/sense/etc it. Once the entity is there one would only have to give it the command, license it to depart and close the ritual as usual. But how would they know if the entity has arrived? This is where experience kicks, consisting of their experiences during all the previous conjuration rituals. While this applies only a little for beginners, the command should be given at some point regardless of any sign the entity is there, and a follow-up observation is to be performed to see whether there's any sign one's desire is closer to manifesting.

This does not apply in the case information is sought from the entity and so it would be best to postpone such operations for a more quiet time. Unlike rituals that are done to generate change in someone and (especially) in the environment, or both, rituals performed solely to obtain information from spirits do not require auspicious astro weather although if it's a planetary spirit it can show up pissed or bored or whatever depending on the weather.

I would also argue rituals performed on changing something within don't require so great an auspicious time, but it would be best to avoid challenging times due to the fact they can generate more probable unwanted consequences. For example, off the top, what good is it to improve your communication skills if you become an annoying blabbermouth?