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In response to yesterday’s post, Lisa asks:
Is the software different for ritual vs psychic systems? Does the system connect to a different part of the mind? Can an untrained person make a connection easier to this type of system?
To clarify: “Ethereal software” is just a straight re-naming of “system.” So systems don’t run on software; systems are ethereal software. Both terms refer to the external forces people channel to drive magick.
But the bigger question: Is there a difference in using ritual vs non-ritual forces? Short answer is no. But if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that I’m not big on short answers.
Different forces connect to different parts of the mind, but I don’t think there’s a standard where all ritual forces connect to one part and all healing forces go to another. The difficulty of using ritual forces should be roughly the same as using non-ritual forces.
For this post, I’ll assume difficulty = the skill required by the mage to accurately send instructions to the force.
I’d expect that a hard-to-use ritual force is about as hard to use as a hard-to-use non-ritual force, and same for easy and average difficulty forces in both categories. If you graph difficulty of each of ritual force, and each non-ritual force, I expect you’ll find the variation within a category exceeds the average difference between the categories.
So what makes ritual forces require rituals? They don’t, actually. With the right techniques, you can instruct them with just words. The difference is, ritual forces additionally respond to rituals, and sometimes will only play nice* if you do the ritual.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.*Play nice = Read your thoughts for you. If you don’t do the ritual, they you may have to package and send your thoughts, doing work the force normally does for you. By the way, that link goes to an old post, so not everything in there is how I’d do it today.
Tags: Ethereal Software