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This post points you to the right resources to learn direct magick for novice, intermediate and experienced mages.
Review: What’s Going On?
Direct magick is when you do magick yourself, rather than channeling an outside force (called a “system”).
You can do just direct magick, or you can do some direct magick and some system-based magick. Either way, learning direct magick will help you understand magick better, debug your techniques so they work more reliably, and create new techniques to solve difficult problems.
If you’re just joining us, read the rest of the series to see how magick works, how direct magick fits in, and why you should learn it. Click here for the first post.
Learning Direct Magick for Novices
A novice is someone just starting to learn magick. If you already know some other style (Thelema, Reiki, etc.), you’re not a novice.
Direct magick will help you learn the core skills faster. Those core skills will help you succeed in any style — ritual magick, energy healing, psychic intuition, or advanced direct magick — and help you see the connections between those styles.
Skills You’ll Learn
Here are some skills you’ll learn in your first few months studying direct magick:
- How to engage the parts of your mind that drive magick (your “mental muscles”) anytime you want.
- How to work with energy, connections, and the other building blocks of magick.
- How to direct your unconscious through a magick technique, so you can read the procedure, follow each step, and get it right the first time.
How It Will Help You
These are the core skills behind all magick. A ritual or visualization doesn’t do anything unless your mental muscles are awake and you can direct them to move energy and connections.
You can learn these core skills as you practice you style’s rituals, energy visualizations, etc. But you won’t get any results until you learn the core skills, and it’s easy to get discouraged in those months.
By focusing on the core skills with targeted exercises, you’ll learn them faster. Then you can succeed with any style quickly, without the months of spin-up.
Where to Start
Start with this energy meditation. Then learn to engage your mental muscles consciously. Then follow The 3 Steps to Learning Conscious Magick.
If you practice twice a day, 10 minutes a session, the energy meditation takes about a week to learn. Learning to consciously engage your mental muscles is 3 steps, each takes about a week. And the 3 Steps series takes about 2 weeks per step. In total, it’s about 3 months.
After that, look at the tag cloud in the bar on the right to see some of the magick techniques you can learn. Energy healing, psychic intuition and protection are good ones to start with.
Direct Magick for Intermediate Mages
If you’re already learning a style of magick, learning direct magick will help you debug your techniques, so they go from “I think it’s working” to “definitely working.” Here’s how.
What You’ll Learn
- How to watch each step of your magick as you do it, to spot where your expectations don’t match what really happens.
- How to feel the difference between signatures so you can recognize spirits and diagnose injuries.
- How to awaken and strengthen your mental muscles quickly.
How It Will Help You
As an intermediate mage, you know the rituals, visualizations and other procedures of your style. Your main challenge is debugging: Finding the places where those procedures don’t work, and fixing them.
Debugging requires real-time feedback. Seeing what really happens — not what you expect to happen, not what you imagine is happening, but what’s really going on — so you can figure out how to make it work.
As you debug your magick procedures, you’ll want to work with more aspects of magick: Smaller connections, more precise energies, and new domains like the energies of muscles, nerves, or spirits. Each of those skills is handled by specialized mental muscles. You learn the basics of that skill by awakening and strengthening those muscles. Using magick to turn them on is faster than developing them incidentally as you practice.
Where to Start
Start by learning to engage your mental muscles consciously, then follow The 3 Steps to Learning Conscious Magick.
Learning to consciously engage your mental muscles takes novices several weeks, but it should go faster for more experienced mages. The 3 steps series takes 1-2 weeks per step. You should have useful skills to start learning faster within your first month.
I’ll post articles on more accurate sensory techniques, how to awaken and strengthen your mental muscles, and other intermediate topics soon.
Direct Magick for Experienced Mages
If you already know several styles of magick, direct magick will let you create new techniques in those styles, or create a whole new style. Here’s how.
What You’ll Learn
- How to watch each step of your magick more accurately, to see each connection and signature.
- How to engage new parts of your mind, so you can work with new aspects of magick.
- How to quickly find and learn new systems to drive new aspects of magick.
How It Will Help You
Learning your first style was probably challenging. Even after memorizing the procedures (rituals, visualizations, etc.), it took practice to make them work. But by your third style, most new procedures work right away. That’s good, because it means you’ve mastered the core skills to use a system*. But without real challenges, you’ll stop growing.
*Remember, all popular styles are based on systems. The mage channels the system. Once you know how to use systems, you won’t learn new core skills by learning another system.
The way to keep growing is to do more of magick yourself, and rely on systems less. That’s the essence of direct magick.
Doing magick yourself lets you do more than just tweak techniques. Once you can see all the parts of your magick accurately, you can build the understanding to create entirely new procedures. Once you learn to use new parts of your mind and new systems, you’ll be able to push the boundaries of your style, or create a new, non-fluffy style from scratch. Those are the challenges that lead to growth.
Where to Start
Start by learning to engage your mental muscles consciously, then follow The 3 Steps to Learning Conscious Magick. The exercises should be easy for you, but those posts introduce concepts you’ll need later. Then read guides to particular techniques, like consciousness integration and bypassing shielding. And check back later for guides on advanced core skills.
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