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This week is about the skill of learning magick. Read the previous posts on goals and feedback.
Today, the third part of Ericsson’s deliberate practice:
Focus on technique, not just immediate success.
I love that philosophy. Learn the building blocks first. Worry about outcome later.
Learning Technique = Asking Questions
I started learning direct magick with one question: When I build energy, what really happens?
Like a toddler, with each answer I repeated the question. “What really happens?”
Eventually, I had unraveled how the body produces energy, how the mind controls it, how systems are involved, and how to use all that to perform magick.
Deriving Magick
Established styles like Golden Dawn, Enochian or Reiki come with systems: magickal structures that connect to you, read your intent and perform the magick.
Think of systems as magick computers. You don’t need to know how the magick works. You just need to use the right software.
Direct mages do magick, well, directly. Without systems. You do each step yourself, constructing your own effects from what you understand of magick.
Using a system only teaches you about that system’s commands. Learning how that system works, and how to do it yourself, requires the un-mediated, direct experience of magick.
Exponential Learning
Creating your first useful effect requires a broad understanding of magick.
For example, energy healing requires recognizing energy states, altering the body’s energy, and changing energy signatures from magickal domain to physical domain. Miss a piece and you’ll spend a lot of effort forcing the other pieces to compensate.
Once you have the broad understanding to create one useful effect, creating another is easy. Eventually, you can use magick to improve your ability to do magick. It’s an exponential learning curve.
Curiosity
I started practicing magick as a kid. It took a decade to learn any useful effects. It takes most adult mages 2-3 years.
I didn’t think about useful effects, though. I was just curious about how reality worked. So I asked questions and figured out the answers.
These days, I love the tactile experience of doing magick. I want to see the magick work, understand all the steps, and explore new pieces every day. You don’t get that doing magick with systems.
Focus on technique. Not immediate success. That’s the recipe for learning direct magick.
Other posts in this series:- Learning Magick: Goals, Paths and Detours (April 12, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Feedback and Honesty (April 13, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Focus on Technique (April 15, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Freedom to Play (April 16, 2010)
Tags: Learning
My concept of energy differs from yours. Can you explain how to transition to physical energy?
You know how a connection to something magickal like a system feels different than a connection to the physical body? If you view the small-scale signature, they have different signature building blocks (called the “underlying signature”).
Same deal for energy. The energy that works with magickal structures like a system has a different underlying signature than the energy that works with the physical body. If you make “normal” energy without specifying a domain, it will usually be magickal energy rather than physical energy.
In order for magickal energy to heal the body, it has to transition to physical energy. There are several steps to this transition, but mostly, a magickal structure absorbs the magickal energy and emits physical energy, just like solar panels absorb photons and emit electricity.
This transition has a lot of variables. You need to watch it a few times to get the hang of it. You want to work backwards: Figure out the physical energy you want, then figure out the magickal energy that will produce it, and then turn on magickal energy production for that energy signature.
Does that help?
Thank you for the clarification. I didn’t realize there was an intermediate handler for the energy change. I will work with this new concept and let you know how it goes. Lisa