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In this series, I’m investigating how an orgone generator can produce magickal energy and charge a talisman. After some preliminary testing, I’m now focusing on the quartz at the center of the orgonite.
My first step, whenever I start exploring a new part of magick, is to simply connect and look around. This is tricky for me to explain, because we don’t have a mag-o-scope to display the magickal structures like x-rays display bones, so it’s not immediately clear what I mean by “look around.”
I’m normally skeptical when someone says they connected to X and saw Y. You should be too. Most mages mean that they absorbed a bit of X’s energy, relaxed their mind and let images enter their thoughts. And we all know how easily your expectations can influence the images that happen into your thoughts.
Sometimes, the images come from a source of psychic intuitions. Which means they’re symbolic, and a response to whatever question that ethereal software thinks was asked. So, not a firm basis for exploring how magick works, either.
To explore the inner-workings of magick, I had to develop a reliable way of seeing the moving parts. I call that technique “sensory connections.” Let’s review it before using it to explore the crystals.
If you just want the results, skip to “Exploring Quartz.”
Sensory Connections
I’ll start with a review of sensory connections, one of the core techniques of direct magick. It’s somewhat advanced, so don’t worry if you don’t follow every step, but here’s a quick summary of the technique:
- Quiet your energy. Not so you don’t have energy, but so it’s steady. That way, changes in your own energy won’t distract you.
- Make a connection without energy along it. This requires good control of mental muscles that handle connections.
- For a good sensory connection, the structure that makes up the connection should also have a low amount of power.
- Break that connection into many smaller ones, each covering one building block of the overall signature. The sum of those building blocks should add up to the overall signature. The smaller the scale of building blocks, the better.
- Make many of these connections through the area you’re interested in, so you get a map, rather than a single point. The more points you touch, the better.
- Align to signature of the area (which feels like getting the right focus for a microscope). Now you’re ready to look around. It’s more of feeling than seeing, even though I say “see” most of the time.
It’s… a bit complicated. Most direct magick is. To learn it, you’ll need to develop the mental muscles for each step, walk those muscles through the process, and practice each step it until it’s easy. Then practice the whole sequence together. I developed sensory connections over several years, but you could probably learn it in a few of months with focused practice. The full series on sensory connections is here, and I’ll be returning to it as I write my book.
Summary: I don’t have a mag-o-scope. Instead, I have a fancy technique that gives me a pretty good picture of magickal structures, along with some exercises for you to learn it. But ultimately, you’ll just have to trust me. Which hopefully you do, because distrust-fully reading a blog doesn’t sound like much fun.
Exploring Quartz
I connected to the quartz crystal, and spotted a large structure. Not energy at this point, because I’m not sending any energy into the crystal. (Remember, sensory connections don’t send energy.) But a large structure that could contain energy if you put some in.
That’s quite unusual. Normally, when I connect to something that’s alive, I see a lot of active structures, with their own energy. And when I connect to something that’s not alive — whether it’s dead wood or inorganic material — there’s hardly any structures there. It’s quite hard to spot anything, really. So a large, obvious, unpowered structure in nonliving matter? This is the first time I’ve seen that.
I also connected to an amethyst I had lying around. (I’d bought them around a decade ago, then gave them to Lisa because they were pretty.) Same deal: A large, obvious, unpowered structure. It had a different signature, but it’s essentially the same thing. So I’m guessing this is common to all quartzs, and possibly all crystals.
Lisa also had a necklace made of rose quartz, machined into half-inch beads. I could see a similar structure in each bead, but it was much smaller and less obvious. I think the machining damaged the magickal structure in some way.
And one last test: Do two pieces of quartz connect to the same magickal structure, or does each one have its own structure? If this is all based on some ethereal software for quartz, then all pieces of quartz would probably connect to the same structure, which would probably go to the ethereal software. Whereas, if the quartz itself creates a magickal structure, each piece would have its own.
I took two pieces of quartz, one in each hand, connected to them, and looked through those structures for my other connections. (This is a standard way that I test if two paths lead to the same structure. Spotting my own connection is fairly easy.) I could not spot my connection, which means each piece of quartz has its own magickal structure. Which suggests that the crystal generates the magickal structure, rather than receiving it from ethereal software.
This is the first time I’ve encountered a physical object generating a magickal anything, aside from living cells. I’m intrigued.
Tomorrow: How quartz interacts with magickal energy, and why people think quartz amplifies energy.
Other posts in this series:- Energizing Quartz, Water and Ice (February 16, 2012)
- Do Magnets Energize Quartz? (February 20, 2012)
- Experiments with Orgone (February 13, 2012)
- Just What Is Orgonite? (February 13, 2012)
- Exploring Quartz (February 14, 2012)
Normally I’m not a fan of presenting anything internal like this as objective, but in this case I will say that your findings pretty much line up with what I’ve sensed working with crystals. In my experience it’s not just forms of quartz – I’ve also sensed this sort of structure in other crystals like carnelian, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and so forth. It seems to be a general characteristic that goes along with a crystalline molecular matrix. It may also be related to the piezoelectric effect – when exposed to electromagnetic radiation a crystal can produce physical electricity (which is why a crystal radio doesn’t need a power source).
Though I will say, I’d really like to confirm those findings on that mag-o-scope! ;-)
I have a little test I’d like to do, if you’ll oblige me. I’ve already done most of the testing I’ll be writing about in the next few days, so I know there’s some fairly cool stuff coming up. I’m curious, how would you go about exploring this? In particular, I’m wondering if a more methodical approach would gain reliability at the cost of some results.
I’m not trying to put you on the spot here. This is one of the rare situations where we can actually compare different experimental methods. We’re both committing blind: I’ve already done my tests, and if what you suggest turns up any new results, I’ll be sure to flag them separately. You know there’s something worth finding here, but you don’t know what it is yet, which should help focus your attention but won’t really help with the methods. It seems like a good way to gather some data of about different ways of exploring magick, and get some ability to quantify the trade-offs. I’m game if you are.
By the way, this is open to anyone familiar with modern scientific methods.
If this is a ‘structure’ waiting to be ‘energized’ — how would one go about charging it? Like in some fluffy books — only let it be exposed to the full of the moon? or only the sun at midday? Or ‘pump in’ energy with an intent and focus? Was just wondering… perhaps I’m not ‘pumping’ correctly (or at all).
I haven’t tested the light of the full moon or the sun at midday, but I doubt those work. Though, basically everything coming up in this series is something I doubted would work, so at this point, I’m much less certain in my doubts.
But the main way you would charge it is building energy in yourself and pumping it into the quartz. There’ve been times in my magick practice when I was so focused on precisely controlling connections that I got rusty with controlling energy, so here’s a post on energy meditation that might help:
https://magickofthought.com/2010/07/how-to-begin-magick-for-complete-novices
It has a bunch of debugging tips, too. Let me ask you, what’s happening that makes you think you’re not pumping correctly?
I honestly don’t think there is an objective way to measure most of this, to tell you the truth. That’s why I’d love to have a mag-o-scope! ;-)
Let’s see – you could try testing whether the piezoelectric effect is involved by isolating the crystal in some way from electromagnetic radiation and retesting to see if you get different results. The problem is for that to be objective you would need both a double-blind and a decent sample size. That’s impractical without a lot of time and effort, but if you happen to have the sort of setup that would allow for it I would love to hear your results.
You could charge up a crystal to hold a particular type of magical energy and then do a version of the ritual with the crystal and a version without it, against a hard probability like lottery numbers. That could tell you whether or not the energy of the crystal influences the probability shift generated by the ritual, again, if you had a large enough sample.
Those are all I can think of at the moment that would look anything like hard science. Understand, it’s not like I don’t use subjective techniques in my personal practice, and with crystals it sounds like I use many of the same methods you do. I’m just wary about presenting such findings as objective facts to which other magicians’ practices should conform.
Without ‘hard science’ or a repeatable experimental methodology, is not all of this ‘subjective’? I mean, even if each one of us did Mike’s step by step energy rising, connections to structures, program desired results, etc. — would each of us get the exact same results? I conjecture — possibly if one is using the ‘program’ of an existing energetic structure but, if one goes to making one of their own…. or connects directly to a person’s body for healing… would it result in the same ‘healing’ or new energy construct?
I know.. kind of off the ‘what to do about quartz’ question. I live not far from a quartz ‘mine’ which I’ll be visiting this late spring or summer.. so hope to have a bunch of ‘raw crystals’ to play with. (( I hope ))
Thanks guys.
Here’s how I’ve come to see it: In medicine, you start with a cheap case study (1 patient), then a group study (multiple patients, no control), and after a large group study, move on to a proper, double-blind controlled test.
In physics, you gather a lot of measurements, do a bunch of math, and only then do the expensive tests. Einstein did a ton of math before anyone bothered comparing atomic clocks at different altitudes and velocities.
So, I think these subjective, “here’s what I see when I connect” posts are like that: Low-cost ways to gather some info and see what’s worth investigating. Not as reliable as inventing a mag-o-scope, but a good first step.
Though I am trying to get a properly-blinded test in for a post later this week.
Though I do go back and forth on this. When I’m thinking about how to standardize things, so that everyone can participate in exploring magick, what I just posted is basically what I think: Subject of his step one, objective step two.
When I think about how to most effectively build useful techniques, though, you need a really good mag-o-scope to give the level of detail you can get with the good sensory connections. It’s like a potter’s feel for the clay: You could replace the potter’s hands with a machine, programmed to shape the clay in the right way, but it would need to be a really good machine to make something of the same quality.
On the whole, my strategy is to use sensory connections to understand the inner-workings of magick, then use that understanding to develop techniques that can be easily detected and verified. The technique then becomes evidence for the model that suggested it, and when a model gives you multiple good techniques, that’s a strong indication that the model is onto something.
But that strategy is just what I’ve always done. Not something I’ve sat down and thought about. I’ll have to write more about this at some point.