1. Rites of purification. Without first being purified, you cannot have access to the gods, make sacrifices, hear the oracle and understand the truth, and you cannot benefit from a dream which will enlighten you through ambiguous but decipherable signs.
2. Concentrating of the soul (the breath, the pneuma). The soul is something mobile that can be disturbed and over which the outside can exercise a hold. One must avoid dispersal of the soul. One must concentrate the soul, gather it up, condense it, and unite it in itself in order to give it a mode of existence, a solidity, which will enable it to last, to endure, and hold out throughout life and not be scattered when death comes.
3. The technique of withdrawal (anakhoresis). A particular way of detaching yourself and absenting yourself from the world in which you happen to be, but doing it so "on the spot": somehow breaking contact with the external world, no longer feeling sensations, no longer being disturbed by everything taking place around the self, acting as if you no longer see, and actually no longer seeing what is there before your eyes. A technique of visible absence. You are always there, visible to the eyes of others. But you are absent, elsewhere.
4. Practice of endurance. It enables one either to bear painful and hard ordeals or to resist temptations one may be offered.
5. Th technique of testing. Organize a tempting situation and test your ability to resist it.
Truth cannot be attained without a certain practice which transform the subject's mode of being.
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