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Sensory connections are your eyes. They let you watch your magick as it works, so you know what actually happened, and how it differed from what you expected to happen. They let you see the current state of everything you’re working with, so you can diagnose illnesses, shield properly, and recognize spirits. And they let you watch the techniques of other mages you know, so you can understand, copy, and improve on them.
The better your sensory connections are, the more you can see. If you don’t use sensory connections yet, this series will teach you everything you need to get started. If you already use sensory connections, this series will give you some tips to use them better.
This post is an overview. Don’t worry if you can’t do the techniques I describe, the rest of this series will teach you how. Also, give yourself a few weeks to work through this series. It’s harder than the steps that came before, but I promise, it’s worth it. Once you can see all the pieces that make your magick work, you’ll learn much faster, and you’ll be able to create more noticeable, reliable changes in the world.
How Magickal Sensing Works
You sense signatures. Signatures aren’t just for energy. Remember that everything has a signature.
Say you’re connected to a magickal structure, which might be a spirit, another mage’s connection, a magick muscle, etc, but you don’t know which it is. You can figure that out by looking at the small-scale building blocks of the signature*. Each type of structure has different signature building blocks. With practice, you’ll learn to recognize the building blocks of each domain, which lets you figure out what you’re connected to quickly.
*For a review of signature scale, see this post.
At larger scales, you can see additional details of the structure. For example, if you’re working with physical tissue, the medium-scale signature tells you what type of tissue it is (muscles, tendons, nerves, etc), and the large-scale signature tells you the state of that tissue (inflamed, torn, healthy, etc). But you can only view those medium- and large-scale signatures if you first align your connection’s small-scale signature to the small-scale signature of the structure you’re viewing.
How Sensory Connections Work
Sensory connections absorb a little bit of energy. Specifically, sensory connections absorb it passively. Think of energy like water pressure or heat: It flows from a structure with more energy to the one with less. By making connections with less energy than the thing they connect to, you will passively absorb a little energy. This is different from draining connections, which grab and forcibly remove energy. Think of sensory connections as passively noticing the fragrance that a rose is already giving off.
One note here: “Energy” has 2 meanings. The one you’re probably most familiar with is the energy that flows through your body, along connections, and gets delivered in Reiki-type healing techniques. I think of that energy as flowing on top of structures. The other meaning is the energy inside a structure. That energy doesn’t flow around. Instead, it makes the structure move and interact with other structures. When you sense the signature of most structures, you’re absorbing this internal energy, not the energy that’s flowing on their surface. To avoid confusion, I call this second type of energy “activation,” because it’s what makes a structure active.
I’ve been told that last paragraph is the most challenging in this post. Don’t worry if you didn’t get it, I’ll explain it again before we use it.
A single sensory connection detects a particular signature in a single spot. To watch any interesting magick, you’ll need to watch many signatures by making a complex connection out of many single connections. Also, you’ll need to watch those signatures in many places to understand how all the different pieces move and interact, so you’ll make many of those complex connections throughout the structure. When I say “sensory connection,” I usually mean this set of complex connections. When I mean a single connection for a single signature in a single point, I’ll try to say “single connection.”
Summary: Making Good Sensory Connections
A good sensory connection:
- Matches the small-scale signature of whatever you’re looking at.
- Uses many connections at each point to detect all the small-scale signatures you’re interested in.
- Repeats that set of connections at many points to assemble a good picture of whatever you’re looking at.
This series will walk you through how to do each of those items, plus a few others.
Learning Sensory Connections
This series will show you skills that I developed over a couple of years. Each time I encountered parts of magick I couldn’t understand, I developed a new piece of sensory connections so I could continue moving forward.
Don’t try to learn everything in one go. Practice the exercises in one post until you can do it if you focus, then practice that skill while you learn some other technique, like shielding, energy healing, influencing emotions, etc. (Look at the bar to the left for some ideas). After a few weeks, once that part of sensory connections becomes easy, come back to this series for the next step. In this series, do each post in order, since later ones build on earlier skills.
Next
Check back next week for the first set of exercises to learn sensory connections so you can watch your magick more accurately.
Other posts in this series:- How To See Magick Clearly (February 10, 2011)
- Sensory Connections - Step 1: Quiet Connections (February 24, 2011)
- Sensory Connections - Step 2: Seeing Smaller Connections (March 10, 2011)
- Sensory Connections - Step 3: Seeing New Signatures (March 16, 2011)
- Sensory Connections - Step 4: Seeing Areas (March 24, 2011)
- Finding Where Mind Meets Body (March 30, 2011)
Tags: Connections, Signatures