Some thoughts on mentalism and walking.
Habits -- especially daily habits -- reinforce themselves in tangible and intangible ways. A daily practice of writing, cooking, or some other creative pursuit will not only provide you with the physical fruits of your labor -- finished pages or home-cooked meals -- but will sharpen your skills and strengthen your confidence. Unproductive habits take on lives of their own, too, with predictable results. And habits of any stripe become easier to continue the more often you perform them, especially if you've set up your life to make following them easy.
One of the best habits you can cultivate for your aetheric development is a daily walk. Modern life has a tendency to turn our attention inward, and as we focus on ourselves we lose our attention to the details of the world around us. By getting up from the desks and tables and screens that command so much of our time and attention, we heighten our perceptions of other people and the environments we live in. The act of walking increases our heart rate and quickens our breathing, bringing us a greater sense of our physical body. The walking route you choose should ideally be one which puts you into this heightened state for at least ten minutes.
Make your walk something you can easily incorporate into your daily life. If the distance of your commute to work or school is a few miles or less, you might be able to walk there instead of driving. If you go out to lunch, try walking there, too. If you find that your life simply hasn't got a half-hour or so for you to devote to walking, it may be time to reevaluate the daily habits you've already cultivated. If there are any you'd like to eliminate or change, perhaps the inclusion of a daily walk can help you with that. It can be helpful to incorporate some practical goal with your walk -- a visit to the grocery store, or your route to work, for example. This can help you feel the time spent on your walk is not "wasted" (a feeling that is peculiar to modern life). Whether or not the walk is tied to another of your day's activities, allow the time while you are actually walking to be yours alone. This means no phone conversations, no music, not even a walking companion. You will need your senses to be fully engaged with the walk itself.
While you're on your walk, take note of the people and places along the way. Walking moves you along your route much more slowly than driving, and as such you have more opportunity to notice the details. See if you can make out details of the buildings and trees you haven't noticed before. What do you see that adds depth to your mental picture of these places? Note these well, and look for them each time you pass, while at the same time keeping your eyes open for more.
As you repeat your walk the next day, and the next, pay attention to which aspects of it change, and which stay the same. If your walk happens at the same time every day, you might find that you pass the same people on their own daily walks. Maybe some of them are only on your route certain days of the weeks, taking the weekends off, for example. Is the car traffic the same every day? As the weeks turn to months, notice how the position of the sun is different when you begin and end your walks. You may get to the point where your observation of this is very specific. How does the weather change as your walking routine stretches across the seasons?
What does any of this have to do with mentalism? Even though we may think of our walk as a strongly material-world activity, it puts us into an environment of more rich and varied aether than if we were home instead, even if we were doing something intellectually stimulating there. Activities such as reading or surfing the Internet use our minds, and in a way these are actions which hint at the image-making involved in the visualization techniques of mentalism, but these worlds are largely of our own, self-directed creation. Our decisions take us where we desire to go, and the reality which results is one more or less of our own design. This is dramatically less so on one's walk. The route may be our own, as may the thoughts and impressions we receive while walking, but there are many more souls around us, especially if our walk takes us through a busy part of a city.
This outward-looking approach, as opposed to an inward-looking one, is like a multi-course feast for our aetheric selves, providing us with an ever-changing parade of sights, sounds, scents, and other sensations outside our immediate control. The fact that we follow the same route every day, at the same time, gives us a consistency by which to judge similarity or difference of these sensations. And having this sense of distinction helps us to see the finer details that make up so much of mentalism. The walk, and your collected observations from it, can be the starting point for many aetheric exercises. Think of the walk as a laboratory in which you can try different experiments, each one with a particular focus.
The accomplished clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner encouraged his students to observe the weather at the same time each day. By seeing how the clouds were shaped and colored, and noticing the temperature and the force and direction of the wind, the careful observers soon found they were engaging in a very "grounded" form of divination. The patterns observed told them much about what to expect from one day to the next, and they became relatively successful "weathermen." This close observation is at the heart of the ancient practice of divination. We now live in a time where more than ever before it is easy to disconnect from the natural rhythms which surround us. Yet if we can enter back into awareness of them, they can reveal much and give us a greater understanding of what is too easily dismissed as superstition and senseless magical thinking. The most fascinating realization we can have as we try these "silly" exercises is that we are in fact putting ourselves far more in touch with reality than the person who depends on the weatherman's daily report.
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