HP: A New Life

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Harry pov:

Just like Death had said the first few years of his new life were a blur to harry. He spent all of his time inside his own mind while his infant body went through the motions.

So excluding the time for sleep which is a lot, harry spent most of his time training his occlumency. While most of those ridiculous fanfictions that Richard read would have you believe that you need to find your mindscape and fill it with all kinds of rubbish like walls, tanks, etc, none of that is even remotely correct.

Real occlumency is structuring and defending your mind with the help of magic. If a person tries to make a mindscape and fill it with all kinds of garbage, death is the best possible outcome compared to the damage this will inflict on their mind.

Occlumency is divided into three stages. The first stage is simple, it is just clearing your mind. Even muggles can do this as this stage doesn't require any magic. You just have to meditate and clear your mind to remove any thoughts.

The goal of this stage is simple. The mind is not a file cabinet that anyone can just open find the file that they want and read it. It is a complicated structure and every mind handles and stores information in its own unique way.

So when a wizard or a witch uses legilimency they try to latch onto your thoughts to reach the information they want. It can't be any random thoughts either, the thoughts have to be relevant to the information they are trying to extract.

If your mind is clear with no thoughts going through it then legilimency is of no use as there are no thoughts for your attacker to latch onto.

A wizard or a witch has a much easier time achieving this state of focus and concentration than a muggle because we can just try to sense the magic flowing through our bodies. This is why this stage also helps wizards to improve their control and their connection to magic. That's why achieving this stage is compulsory for Hogwarts students during their third year.

Every third-year student learns this, it takes most of them months to even enter this state for the first time but it gets easier with practice. At the start, students need about 50 minutes to an hour to enter this state but with practice, it goes down to less than 5 minutes.

This is also the ministry standard to pass this class, if they don't, they have to take this class again for their fourth year.

Most adult wizards and witches can enter this state in a minute, and Aurors only take a few seconds. Aside from defending your mind, this state of focus has all kinds of benefits like better information retention, improved memory and efficiency, etc.

While every wizard can do this with enough practise there are very few who can truly master this stage. To truly master this stage you have to train your mind to the point that you can enter the state of complete focus instantly no matter the circumstances. Harry only knows three wizards besides himself who achieved this, Dumbledore, Snape and Voldemort.

For harry achieving this was more of a necessity than anything else, with a piece of Voldemort's soul stuck to his forehead no matter how strong his mental shields were, to Voldemort they made no difference since he could directly bypass them. That's why harry had to suffer through snape's legilimency assaults as the greasy git was the only wizard skilled enough to train harry's mind without breaking it.

Last time he had to suffer through months of torture on his mind but it paid off in the end. Harry achieved complete mastery of the first stage in less than a day this time.

After the first stage comes the second, some might call this stage the 'real' occlumency because this is where we use magic to reinforce the mind.

In this stage, a wizard first enters the state of focus from the first stage and then slowly starts using his magic to sort his mind and build mental defences. This can only be done through daily practice and mental discipline.

A wizard's metal defence depends solely on their mental strength and the effort they put into building their shields. So you can't tell how strong or weak a person's occlumency is without testing it yourself. But Aurors do have to meet high standards and have routine occlumency tests as they handle a lot of sensitive information.

Aside from defending the mind, these shields can also be used in lots of ways, like suppressing emotions, memories, thoughts, and even blocking out unnecessary information and senses.

This also helps sort out a wizard's mind so he can remove any unnecessary and irrelevant information and only store what's important. This basically gives the wizard a perfect memory of whatever they choose to store inside their mind.

Both the first and second stages of occlumency are interconnected and are dependent on each other, you can't get to the second stage before having a firm grasp on the first and the second stage reinforces the first stage.

It took harry three years to get his mental shields back to what they were before he was sent back in time. Thankfully occlumency only uses a very limited amount of magic or this would have taken much longer.

To completely master the second stage of occlumency a person has to connect their mental defences to their own subconscious. Normally a wizard has to consciously use their mental shields to defend against any mind attacks. This leaves them venerable for a very tiny amount of time before they can raise their defences.

This doesn't affect most wizards because this time is extremely short and unless they are against extremely skilled legilimens like Snape, Dumbledore or Voldemort, who can use legilimency wandlessly and so skillfully that their targets don't even realise they are being attacked.

But if you completely master the second stage and connect your mental shield with your subconscious then your mind will defend itself against any attack on its own. Even Voldemort can't catch you off-guard if he tried to attack your mind.

But this is very delicate and complex magic, one slip up or just one mistake and the next thing you know is that you forgot how to breathe or your heart just stop beating. Even magic can't help if your subconscious gets messed up.

If Harry wanted he could have made strong enough mental defences in just one year, but he instead chose to stay inside his mind for two more years to perfect the second stage.

Now he is finally ready to face the world and wake up to his new reality.