Magick of Thought

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I met some new mages last night at a pub moot (the UK version of a meetup). We discussed Thelema and direct magick, and I walked them through these mental posture exercises.

They asked some great questions. I’m putting them here so you can join the discussion.

Mental Posture in 3 Steps

• Magick comes from particular parts of your mind. I call them “mental muscles.” By default, they’re unconscious, though you can make them conscious with the right direct magick techniques.
• If your mental muscles are paying attention, they respond to visualizations and rituals by making magick happen. If they’re not paying attention, you can’t do any magick.
• Mental posture is a technique to consciously tell your mental muscles to pay attention.

If this is your first time reading about mental posture, click here for the full explanation and exercises.

How Do You Use It?

This is the hardest part of teaching: Realizing the things that are obvious to you but not to everyone else. That’s why discussions are sometimes better than writing because you can see on someone’s face that they’re getting lost.

Mental posture is how you engage your mental muscles. Your mental muscles are how you do magick. Without them, a ritual is just theater, and visualizing is just pictures in your head.

So, use mental posture before doing any magick. You’re about to do a healing session? Mental posture first. About to try a new ritual? Mental posture first. Engage your magick muscles as the first step of doing any magick, and keep them engaged throughout the technique, either by knowing the feeling of having them engaged, or by keeping the mental posture visualization in the back of your mind.

You’ll get the biggest benefit when you do new techniques. Since your mental muscles won’t recognize what you’re doing, they’re less likely to pay attention without your prompting. This is one reason most ritual mages start every magick session with the same ritual (like a friend who does an LBRP every morning).

If you’ve done a particular technique a dozen or so times, your mental muscles probably recognize the technique itself by now, and will pay attention when you start that technique, even without consciously engaging the mental posture. That’s how most mages do magick.

I’d still do the mental posture, though. It lets you get all your mental muscles paying attention, not just the ones that recognize the technique.

Different Mental Postures

You have lots of mental muscles. Each does something different: Some direct energy, some control connections, some communicate with systems, etc.

Different magick techniques use different mental muscles. Energy meditation, energy healing, rituals, etc, they all use different mental muscles.

That means they each use a different mental posture. If you learn mental posture for energy meditation, it will be slightly different than the posture for ritual magick.

If you’re just starting ritual magick, you haven’t developed a mental posture for it yet. So engage your energy meditation mental posture before doing rituals. It’s close to the right mental posture, so you’re better off than if you didn’t engage any mental muscles.

But if you’re an experienced ritual mage, make one mental posture for energy meditations and another for ritual magick. Just repeat the exercises with a slightly different visualization, using the LBRP (or some other ritual you find easy) rather than an energy meditation. It takes about 20 minutes to make a visualization and connect it to the right mental posture, so you can make a few of them easily.

How I Created the Technique

Direct magick is new. Not “started in the 50s” new. It’s a style I’ve been creating for the past ~20 years. One of those techniques is mental posture.

I created the technique in 2010 to help novice mages get started with magick. See, engaging your mental muscles is a skill every experienced mage has. It’s how we get ready for magick. Personally, I just know the feeling of getting into the right mental posture, and there’s no visualization involved.

The first version of the class focused on that feeling, not the visualization. Turns out, visualizations really help beginners.

But, even though mental posture is one of the main skills separating experienced mages from novices, I hadn’t seen any techniques to teach it. It was just something you picked up through practice. Which makes learning much slower.

My guess is, no one was teaching it because mental muscles are part of magick’s implementation, and most mages focus on the interface: What to visualize, what rituals to do, but not what happens after you do those things to turn those symbols and instructions into changes in the world.

Drugs Alter Mental Posture

Mental posture is about the shift from your normal mental state to the mental state where you can do magick. Turning on the parts of your mind that need to turn on, and getting them into the right state to receive your conscious instructions.

Smoking, drinking, pot, etc all affect your brain state. You’re not in your normal mental state anymore. The starting point is different. So the shift you normally do — turn these parts of my mind on, shift their attention in this way — won’t get you to the right state anymore.

If you want to learn a particular magick technique as quickly as possible, always practice it in the same mental state: No drugs, not particularly hungry or stuffed, alert rather than tired.

If you want to learn robust magick that you can use any time, learn your mental posture for magick from all the mental states you normally live in. If you smoke, learn to do your energy meditation while smoking (or right after), then do the mental posture exercises while you still have a lot of nicotine in your system.

Same for tired, hungry, drunk, whatever. Learn to go from all your different mental states to your mental posture for doing magick.

Want to learn sex magick? Practice your mental posture while aroused, then do it while having sex.

The first step to learning any technique is learning to engage your mental posture for magick while you’re in the right situation for doing that technique.

Questions?

Your questions help me explain magick better. Let me know what didn’t quite connect.

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Tags: Mental Posture

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2011 at 11:18 PM and is filed under Beginning Conscious Magick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.