Importance of Occlumency

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 173367

Allie wrote:
> We don't know for sure that Voldemort was using Occlumency against 
Harry, only DD's presumption that he was.  HBP 59: "Lord Voldemort 
has finally realized the dangerous access to his thoughts and 
feelings you have been enjoying.  It appears that he is now employing
Occlumency against you."
> 
> How is it that he "FINALLY" realized, when he used the connection
purposely several weeks before to lure Harry somewhere?  Does "it 
appears" mean "Severus Snape has told me"?  I suppose that's 
possible, in which case it would be more than speculation, BUT -
> 
> I like Harry's logic better.  Voldemort could not possess/project to
him when he was grieving for Sirius; Harry realizes this when he 
grieves for Dobby.  And Harry has finally learned to CONTROL the 
connection, which really worked out better for him than the 
Occlumency ever did.

Carol responds:
Or he finally figured out how to do Occlumency in a different way,
using his emotions rather than blocking them, in contrast to Snape,
who has to prevent the Dark Lord from detecting a suppressed thought
or emotion at close range, a different matter altogether from the
long-range scar connection. 

In OoP, Snape tells Harry, "I am going to attempt to break into your
mind. We are going to see how well you resist. I have been told that
you have already shown aptitude at resisting the Imperius Curse. You
will find that similar powers are needed for this" (Am. ed. 534). What
Snape is saying resembles what Harry ends up doing in DH, but in OoP,
Snape is trying to get him to keep the Dark Lord from deliberately
entering his head while Harry, not realizing that the dream is
planted, keeps resisting him. It's different from GoF, when Voldemort
is unaware of the (one-way) connection.

In DH, Voldemort again seems unaware of the connection. He is no
longer attempting to plant visions in Harry's mind, and he may well be
using Occlumency (needlessly) to block against deliberate intrusions.
Either he's stopped doing so, realizing that Harry isn't making any
such attempts, or LV's Occlumency doesn't work against the
strengthening scar connection. Harry's soul bit is getting stronger,
perhaps trying to connect with the master soul, just as it connects
(horribly) with the soul bit in Nagini in the Bathilda chapter.

Near the end of HBP, Snape shouts, "Blocked again and again and again
until you learn to keep your mouth shut and your mind closed!" (603).
Harry, it turns out, will never need to battle a Death Eater with
anything resembling Snape's duelling prowess, at least not until he
becomes an Auror in later life, and consequently doesn't really need
to learn nonverbal spells (yet); in the end, it isn't his power or
magical skill or power that matters. But Snape's advice on Occlumency,
intended to help Harry in blocking deliberate intrusions into his
mind, turns out to be applicable in a different way. Harry does learn
to do what Snape has been trying to get him to do from the first
Occlumency lesson: control the scar connection by closing his mind.
But it isn't the deliberate intrusions of Voldemort into his own mind,
it's the mental connection, the shared soul, that he teaches himself
to protect against. "Similar powers are needed for this," Snape said
in OoP, and he was right. The mental that allowed Harry to resist an
Imperius Curse in GoF surface at last in DH as Harry learns to control
the connection. Or that's how I read it.)

Carol, wondering if Harry ever remembered Snape's advice after
normalcy was restored and whether he rethought his perception of those
events