I've been trying to wrap my head around a second pass for jotting down a grimoire/book of shadows. I think the step I'll do right now is lay out the thinnest outline with the greatest breadth, then go from there iteratively. The first iteration is a table of contents.
The second iteration is a skeletal summary.
Things exist on different levels.
These four levels are nested, and are not a place you can enter or leave. You're already exist on all levels including physical. The one is every possibility and state manifest. Every timeline that could play out, etc, with no end. The superconscious is Plato's world of forms, a place where all ideas exist. Assume the digits of pi are infinite. If you converted a chunk of digits into binary, then loaded that chunk as a video file, you would get corrupt garbage that won't play in a video player. Shift one digit forward, the same. Repeat this enough times, however, and you would inevitably find every movie that's ever been produced, or ever will. Cool. Let's go lower to the conscious level of reality, which is your mind. You can imagine Shrek, can't you? Cool. Last, the physical world. You can imagine Shrek, but he unfortunately does not physically exist. At the top level, you have everything, and each step down peels a layer away. The physical level of reality is the most crude. A computer screen displays a bunch of dots of colored light. This text does not exist on that level, but on the conscious level where you associate patterns of light into symbols, map those symbols to meaning, and then construct this text in your mind.
Do we discover mathematics, or invent it? A distinction without a difference. An idea floating in the superconscious winds up in the conscious. Whether that comes from the process of reasoning, experimentation, or reading a wikipedia article doesn't change much. An author doesn't have to be alive for you to read their book. You might think a book is a physical manifestation of an idea. Not really. A book is an artifact we conscious critters create. With that artifact, we can perform the task of reading, that is, of detecting patterns, mapping them to symbols, and mapping those symbols to lived experience. Text can't teach you the subjective experience of seeing the color red. It can remind you of your existing memory of the color red, though.
Wish I was done with pedantry, but alas. An entity is an individuated unit of existence. All entities exist in the one, most exist in the superconscious, some in the conscious, and some have a relationship with the physical world. Two governments declare a single patch of land belongs to their country. There is a physical component to both country A and country B, but is that patch of land actually part of their country in any physical sense? Nope, just fictionally. In reality, the country has no physical form. Each party may subjectively claim the patch of land belongs to their country. If enough people agreed, perhaps reaching consensus, then whatever minority disagreeing could be considered mistaken or out of touch. The subjective fiction of that minority bumps into the inter-subjective fiction of the majority. In short, we humans like to believe things are true on the merit that many of us say so. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Is a hotdog a sandwich? Ask, and people will probably have differing opinions even granted the identical physical world to reference in said argument.
Time to mess with you a bit. Your body physically exists, but the person you identify as you does not. You can ship of Theseus your body quite a bit with questions like "are your clothes part of you? What about he dead skin cells you shed? What about the cells that people believe regrow every 7 years?" What you consider "you" and "not you" is axiomatic. It's not a meaningless distinction, but we can decide severe memory loss ends the previous "you" and starts a new and separate "you". Whatever theory of identity you have, it's still a theory. It's a bunch of ideas about how we can think about the physical world, and is not itself the physical world. Hold onto that, because you'll need it for the magick I have to share.
Some folk propose the human mind's fragmented into cerebral and limbic components. Is it? I dunno, but assume it's true and walk with it for a while. Growing up, the limbic grows in first, and so we have a really trippy experience as a toddler that tapers into a more rational experience somewhere around the age 9. The two think in different ways, independently, but also in concert with one another like different instruments in an improvizational jazz band. The cerebral mind reasons through stuff. You thought the price of a jawbreaker was 5 cents, but you checked and it's 5 bucks. You now update your memory of jawbreaker price. How much does a jawbreaker cost? Ah, you're wise. You remember it's 5 bucks. The limbic mind doesn't do that. You get maimed by one dog and all the sudden every barking dog is that same dog that maimed you. You can reason through it all you want, but your brain says "AHHH! I'm about to be maimed by that dog again!". The cerebral mind might do cartwheels and backflips to justify whatever limbic belief, but ultimately that's the foundation.
Ever try to argue with someone about something touchy like politics or religion, and all you get from the other side is the equivalent of "Nuh uhhh!" regardless of how solid your points are? You're hitting a limbic belief, not a cerebral one. They might build a mountain of sophistry on top, but the foundational premise is going to be emotional. Maybe it's not even the belief itself, but the process of being told they are wrong that they have an aversion to. Whatever the case, you can't logic your way past their feels. The same people might get out an electron microscope, zoom in on some issue in an extremely reductive way, and claim they're using facts and logic. I hate to break it to you, but you've got one of those people living in your head. That's yer limbic mind. Whether it's a phobia of dogs, taking up space, being useless/incompetent/needy, not fitting in, saying 'no', public speaking, or some form of bigotry, it's fairly common for there to be some unreasonable junk stuck up in that limbic mind. So, how to tackle your fear of dogs(or whatever)? You gotta fight arguments with arguments, feels with feels. Don't cross the streams. Fortunately, I've got the perfect tool for that.
Congratulations, you've now got two people living in your head! No need to get an MRI and check for little people in your grey matter. They aren't any more physical than the singular "you" that occupied your mind moments ago. They're no less influential to your lived experience than it, either. You've got an inner adult and an inner child. The adult reasons through stuff. The child runs off canned response and does compulsive stuff like telling lies, staying up late playing videogames, and arguing unnecessarily. Your inner adult's worldview is reconciled with your lived experience, adapting as you learn new stuff(the price of a jawbreaker is 5 bucks, remember?). The child's worldview is "DOG SCARY!" If you've got a sizeable backlog of unprocessed trauma(like the bite of '89 that inspired your generalized fear of dogs), that's what you'll want to work on. We'll get to that in the next section.
Oh, you mean that memorization trick where you put numbers/cards in the corners of an imaginary house as a memory hack to leverage your comparatively huge spacial memory? No, but close. Let's make a mind palace together right now. It's a room with two comfortable chairs, a coffee table, and a television. Poof, you now have a mind palace! Oh, wait, to use it we'll need some perspective. Imagine yourself sitting in one of those chairs, looking around the room. Maybe you want to do this with your eyes shut, calming music, and a solid thirty minutes blocked off your schedule. Or maybe you want to do this while driving on the interstate(please don't). Either way, you now have a little avatar to experience the world through. In the palace, lift each of your hands up in front of your eyes and inspect it. Don't move your physical arms. They won't help you in the mind palace. Practice standing up, walking around the room, and sitting back down again. Might be easier for some than others. If you have aphantasia, visualization like this might not be possible, sorry.
Now, spawn in your inner child. It should look like a kid version of you. Swap control from the adult to the child. Do the same exercises moving around in your new mini-me avatar. If you do this while relaxed enough, you'll begin to fool your limbic mind. Remember, that's the part of you that cries when watching a soap opera about completely fictional characters and events. The events in your mind palace don't need to be real for the feelings to be. If you can get the vibes right, you can comfort the inner child as the inner adult/parent and help visit traumatic memories, changing the outcome. Maybe the inner adult pets that dog and calms it down, and your inner child gets licked instead of bit this time. You intellectually know this is fiction, but the limbic mind can be fooled this way. For 3 and a half hours on this technique relating to childhood trauma, have this audio book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UCV7O4BwVM Bradshaw does this better than I could.
Ite, so inner child work(as mentioned above) uses the mind palace to build a bridge between cerebral and limbic minds for healing purposes. This is a form of shadow work, delving the unconscious in order to better understand yourself. Inner child work is just the beginning, though.