The situation as of today
The path to the first degree of initiation into the OTA starts with four knowledge lectures. Demonstrating your knowledge of each lecture involves a quick little quiz once you've done the reading. I'm halfway to sending in my answers for Lesson 3. The answers have been filled out for some time, but Lesson 3 is the first time that the lectures get a bit more involved.
See, Lesson 1's quiz merely hits you with the basics: what's the background of our magical tradition? In this particular case, it's a lot of reading about the Canaanite priest-king, Melchizedek, the biblical trap king, Solomon, and some of the names of power and techniques that we use in ritual/ceremonial use and how they differ to those found in typical Golden Dawn style techniques. It also drops some knowledge on you about The Holy Grail and makes a few recommendations for reading on the side:
The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus
What's more, you get some gnarly heavy metal concepts like:
Those who yet worshiped the Seven Wanderers of the starry vault, Sabian Wizard-Lords of Zodiac and Magick, and the word of She-Who-Blackens.
Lesson 2's quiz gently drops you into the world of self-hypnosis and the meditative techniques necessary for shifting your consciousness into a powerfully magical state. It's laid out in a way that's intended to enlighten total noobs so I was able to slip through this one pretty quickly seeing as how I've been meditating on the regular for quite some time. The techniques described were heckin helpful, though. Poke Runyon, the Archimage and founder of the OTA dealt with some health problems back in the 60's with a self-help hypnosis book called Self Hypnotism: The Techniques and Its Use In Daily Living by Leslie M. Lecron. This book is hilariously dated, addressing women and gay people in a way that screams, "This book was written in the 50's!" but the info contained therein is solid as a rock. Chapters 4 and 5 explain the technique and the rest of the book is theory and application. It dovetails gracefully into the other half of Lesson 2, Raja Yoga and Tratakam Meditation. I've never been interested in yoga but as it turns out what I actually mean by that is that I've never been interested in Hatha Yoga. That's the stuff that every white person thinks of when you say yoga. Raja Yoga is actually pretty righteous. The technique is illustrated in another central textbook for the OTA, The Fundamentals of Yoga by Rammurti Mishra, a swami who knows his business.
Combining the techniques from these two books has been crazy effective. A few days back I dove pretty deep into meditation/hypnosis and felt like the whole thing got a bit out of control as my body felt as though it were alseep and I was dreaming while actually awake. It was a very hard thing to describe but not terribly unpleasant. Mishra's book assures the reader that you hone your ability simply by doing, which is hard for my western mind to grokk. I'm used to micromanaging my improvement in whatever it is I'm doing by doing it, finding the trouble spots and working on those spots in order to improve but Mishra's thesis is pretty sound as I find myself dropping into the hypnotic state fairly easily these days.
I began by using this video. You stare at the black circle in the center without blinking for the entire duration of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBASQ314m7c
Runyon's book, The Book of Solomon's Magick, describes practicing Tratakam meditation with a device called The Samadhi Lamp and its construction looks very much like circle in the video above. The video above has some problems, the mantra and the flashing text can be extremely distracting when the point of the exercise is to narrow your focus like a laser so I've started using something different.
I'm in the middle of lesson 3 now, but I'm closing on the end quickly. The answers have been saved out in a document since last week when I did the reading, but this one has some practical applications and visualization exercises that really need to be mastered before you move on. I've always been really good about visualizing objects and people, so I feel like I'm getting a good feel for it. More on that to come.