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If I’m doing magick accidentally, how do I control it?
A reader asks:
Would you say that all magical processes that a person does can be traced directly to a mental muscle? So that if I am doing something that I do not know how to control I need only look hard enough for the mental muscle responsible to find it.
(For new readers, “mental muscle” is my term for the parts of your mind that drive magick.)
When I see a question about “all,” I instinctively flinch away, because there’s bound to be some exception. Most? Sure. All? No.
For example, someone with zero mental muscles active can still properly do a ritual, and get the forces associated with that ritual (the “ethereal software”) to respond. Using the right ritual, they could issue basic commands to the ethereal software, producing magickal results without using mental muscles or intent. So, no, not all.
But back to the intent of the question: Most magickal processes, particularly complex ones, come from the mage’s mental muscles. Though usually not a single muscle, just like throwing a ball doesn’t trace back to one regular muscle.
When you isolate what individual regular muscles do, they’re basic movements like “flex / extend this joint,” not useful complex tasks like “throw the ball.” Same deal with mental muscles: They handle different types of connections (to the body, mind, etc), handle tasks like recognizing one type of injury from another based on the energy signature, etc. You need a lot of mental muscles working together to accomplish most tasks.
What if you’re trying to do X, and you’re missing one or more mental muscles required? Usually, you just get really tired and find X very challenging to do at all.
Now, for the second half of the question: How to control things that come naturally? That’s probably not a problem with activating more mental muscles (they’re already active, or the thing wouldn’t come naturally). It’s probably related to binding those mental muscles to your conscious mind, so you can consciously feel what they’re doing and direct them.
And there’s a technique for that: Mental posture, where you learn to consciously engage your mental muscles, so you can feel what they’re doing and direct them consciously. To keep your mental muscles from doing things behind your back, just practice the mental posture until it feels natural, so you can keep it engaged all the time. Which will feel incredibly difficult at first, but becomes fairly easy after a few months of practice.
When you do this, make sure you get the mental muscles responsible for the thing you’re trying to control. If you use an energy meditation for the exercises in that post, you’ll learn to consciously engage the mental muscles involved in building energy in your body. So, once you get used to mental postures in general, do another mental posture, replacing the energy meditation with the thing you’re trying to control.
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