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Reliable magick is mostly about testing and debugging your techniques. This series is about how I’m debugging manifesting, so you can borrow ways to debug your techniques, too.
What Is Manifesting?
Manifesting is magick dealing with predicting and influencing events. The complex steps are handled by a system (“system” = the external forces mages and psychics channel for information, energy, etc). You communicate with the system, ask it for what you want, and read its reply. I already have several good manifesting systems, I just need to learn to use them.
If you’re more familiar with psychic intuition, it works basically the same way.
What Success Means
I’m going for detailed, reliable info about questions like “What city should I live in,” “What will the stock market do tomorrow,” “What should I charge for this job,” etc.
I need to make sure that I’m reading each piece of information the system sends me, rather than getting the gist of its message and filling in the gaps myself. And it needs to work for letters and numbers, not just “yes / no” questions.
Also, I’ll need to learn to verify answers, refer to events properly, and learn the syntax to ask these questions. But learning what words to send is relatively easy. The hard part is sending and receiving those words reliably and accurately. That will be my focus here.
Bootstrapping Communication
If you aren’t sure your communication is accurate, how do you test it?
If you don’t do direct magick, you might wonder why I don’t just communicate with a person, and have them verify what I sent / received. The problem is, when you communicate with a spirit or a system, they do a lot of the work for you. When you communicate with another person, one of you has to know all the steps. I don’t, and my friends don’t either, so that’s out. (But it’s something I intend to learn in the next year or so).
But I’m very confident in noticing connections. So I’ll do like star trek’s “one blink for yes, 2 for no,” and have a spirit connect to my mind for yes, and connect to my body for no.
I expect that I’m already receiving yes / no accurately. But I like to be thorough. It would suck to run a bunch of later tests, then discover I was only 75% accurate in yes / no messages.
Increasing Complexity
Now we’re ready for the real tests. At some point along here, I’m going to run into something I can’t do yet. I don’t know where (if I did, I wouldn’t need the tests), but once I find out, that can guide my training.
There are a few ways I’ll increase the complexity of communication:
1. Do More Steps Myself
When a novice mage talks with a spirit, the spirit connects to their brain, puts each signature of the message into the right parts, and handles all the complexities. As the mage gets better, they do more to gather the signatures of their thoughts, place the message into their brain, and pull their own weight in the communication.
As you handle more of the communication yourself, you get better control of the message, so you can read more details and be more sure that you’re reading the message, not just projecting your expectations onto it. That’s why I don’t want to stick with the easy version.
I can communicate easily when the spirit does all the work. I’m not confident in my communication when my partner does less than half the work (when I have to act as the spirit, doing all the steps to make the communication work). I want to find out where in that continuum I start messing up, so I know where to focus.
2. Stamina
Handling one message is easier than handling a conversation. Do I get accurate results when I’m fresh, but lose it after a few minutes of effort? This is one of my main problems (I get tired after a few minutes of communication when I handle around half the steps). I want to quantify it so I can track my progress.
3. Tired / Distracted
When you receive a message, you’re receiving the signatures of the person’s mind as they thought each concept. As you read it, your mind aligns itself to each signature, putting your mind into the same state their mind was in when they thought the message. Since the message is in their signature, the thoughts feel different than your normal thoughts. (That’s how you recognize a message, rather than something you’re just thinking yourself).
But there’s a catch: If, rather than taking each concept into your thoughts one at a time, you take the message as a whole into your head, you won’t read the sender’s words, but you’ll still get their overall signature. So you’ll get the feeling of “these thoughts are from someone else” applied to whatever sentence you expect to hear, but no actual information.
When I’m focused, in a quiet location, I can step through the message and tell when I didn’t properly take their concept into my thoughts. But when I’m distracted or tired, I can’t. I want to confirm that, make sure I’m doing everything right when I’m focused, then gradually introduce more distractions as I practice.
Next
That’s the plan. I’ll blog as I do it over the next few weeks. All the entries will go in this series (list is below).
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Communication, Testing
If you’re interested in validating messages sent by spirits check out the method Trithemius came up with and describes in the Steganographia. It’s basically a secure socket layer designed during the Renaissance. Trithemius’ idea was that you would distribute an encryption key (a public key, in effect) to anyone you wanted to communicate with. Then you would encrypt your message in such a way that it could only be decoded with the public key and send it via a spirit. The recipient would receive the message and then decrypt it.
The decryption would thus verify that the message came from the person who gave you the key and the decryption process itself would act like a checksum to verify that the message was received correctly and in its entirety. The whole process is remarkably like https for something designed in the sixteenth century.
That’s pretty cool. I work in computer security, so it was neat to read about. It looks like it’s straight cryptography, just couched in occult language to make it less obvious what’s really going on, but it’s neat stuff. For more info: http://cryptome.org/jya/tri-crack.htm