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This post continues the series from last week on the three defining aspects of direct magick.
Whether you command forces with symbols, intentions or words, relying on ethereal software has two limitations:
- If the force doesn’t know how to do X, no amount of skill at issuing commands will make X happen.
- You understand what you do. If you issue commands to forces, that’s what you’ll understand — not what the force does to implement those commands.
That’s why most mages, at some point, learn to drive magick themselves. Here’s how it works:
Instead of channeling a force, you connect directly to the thing you want to affect. So to do energy healing for a friend’s knee, you connect to the energy around their knee, along with the pathways that connect that energy to their cells. Which is what the ethereal software would do if you asked it to do the energy healing for their knee.
You can use those connections to look at the energy and pathways, and see how they’re different in injured vs healthy tissue, how they change as the knee heals, and watch what the ethereal software does to drive the energy healing.
You can also use those connections to change the energy and pathways. That’s how the ethereal software does healing techniques, and you can do everything it does. In fact, copying it is just the first step. Once you understand the forces you channel and how they drive energy healing, you can improve on their techniques. It won’t happen right away, but it will happen.
Driving magick yourself doesn’t feel like doing a ritual, or focusing on a visualization, or any of the dozen other ways mages send out intent / commands. Driving magick consciously is a direct, visceral experience, like molding clay with your hands. It’s tactile and intimate. You begin to learn how magick works, not by imagining how it might work, but by seeing how each connection, each signature, and each pathway work together to make magick happen.
I used energy healing as a concrete example, but this applies to most domains of magick. Only manifesting — magick for predicting and influencing events — requires ethereal software, as far as I know.
How to Experience Magick Consciously
Consciously experiencing magick takes two things:
- Driving magick with your own mind, rather than relying on ethereal software.
- Making the magick-driving parts of your mind conscious.
I call those magick-driving parts “mental muscles.” Engaging them is the difference between imagining vs doing magick, just like engaging your leg muscles is the difference between imagining walking vs actually moving.
Each mental muscle does something different. Some are for communicating with spirits and ethereal software. Others are for making sensory connections to directly experience magick. Many are special-purpose, for things like recognizing the signatures of different tissues and injuries.
Everyone has mental muscles, but in most people, they’re hibernating and atrophied from disuse. As you practice a new skill, the mental muscles involved in that skill awaken. (Other mental muscles that are not used by that skill will remain dormant. Just like doing pullups won’t help your legs).
Most non-direct mages have a few strong mental muscles, for the tasks they do often (channeling ethereal software, building energy in their body, etc), and a lot of weak or hibernating mental muscles, for the parts of magick they don’t practice (like communicating with forces in words). A lot of learning direct magick is about awakening those other muscles.
The other side is making those mental muscles conscious. See, driving magick yourself unconsciously doesn’t feel much different than most magick: You use symbolic visualizations and rituals to communicate your intent, and let the mental muscles work out the details.
But once you make your mental muscles conscious, you become aware of each change they make as they work your magick. Not just the broad strokes (“The mental muscle did the energy healing”), but each detail (“The mental muscle connected this energy layer to that magickal structure, changed its signature from X to Y, and turned on power from this core path”).
Seeing those details as you do magick gives you a visceral, intuitive understanding of how magick works, which lets you design new techniques. I’ll go into how to make your mental muscles conscious later in this series, too.
Other posts in this series:- The 3 Defining Aspects of Direct Magick (January 19, 2012)
- Commanding Forces with Words (January 20, 2012)
- Experiencing Magick Consciously (January 28, 2012)
Tags: Mental Muscles