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I’ve been thinking about how Lisa learned magick over the past few years: What I taught her, what she found most useful, and how I’d change it if I were to do it again. For me, this is part of outlining my book, but for you, it might offer some ideas on what to learn next.
I wish I started with the limits of magick. Not as in, “This is what you cannot do,” but as in, “These are things you reasonably can learn in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years.” We got there eventually, but I think that having more realistic expectations would have made her first year easier.
Also, ethics. How do you know magick is safe, and that I’m safe to work with? She’d had some bad experiences with high school friends doing rituals, draining her energy, and similar things that put her off of learning magick. So, a discussion of magick as a tool, how to use it for personal growth, and what I personally do with magick would be a good introduction.
The first actual exercises we did were on recognizing connections. I started by making a connection to her, then making it more obvious until she noticed. (I ended up doing a minor energy attack before she noticed it.) So, step 1 was noticing connections, then making her own connections, so she could look at all these different structures.
I spent some time showing her the direct healing techniques I was developing. (“Direct” = Without using ethereal software.) I think these were interesting, but not all that useful, and I’d probably skip that if I were doing it again.
Lisa really got engaged when she started working with her own ethereal software. As a psychic, she had psychic software already, but it was run by spirits that drained her energy and generally weren’t entirely trustworthy. I tapped my contacts to find some good psychic software, found the one she’s still using today, and helped her expel the old one and connect to the new one. It took about six months to get her used to the new signatures, and she complained quite a bit about losing her constant guidance (and the familiar voice in her head), but at this point, she’s glad she made the change. She can ultimately do a lot more, and get more reliable information, from the new software.
Think of changing ethereal software like moving to a bigger city: At first, you won’t know anyone and everything will be slow and uncomfortable, but with time, you’ll find a better job and be happier. Also, now that I know the right exercises, I could probably get someone through that process in a few weeks.
For the book, I’m working on connecting some new ethereal software to a sigil for you to use. The software is already built, and a friend is beta testing it. Right now, it covers manifesting and basic shielding, and we plan to add energy healing and a few other goodies in the coming weeks. More on that soon, hopefully with the sigil so you can help test it, too.
As she started learning some direct magick — sensory connections, control of energy, controlling her communication, etc — more skilled spirits took notice of her and wanted to drain her increasingly-bountiful energy. So we also worked on shielding. I should have taught her to close connections right after teaching her to recognize them, so she could learn shielding before she needed it. That probably would have saved us a lot of trouble. (Closing connections is more effective than visualizing a shell around yourself.) For the book, I’ll probably have the more advanced techniques as a separate section for you to read as you need it, depending on how much attention you’re attracting from spirits.
Since then, most of our work has centered around helping Lisa communicate more accurately with the psychic software. That’s included awakening mental muscles (done directly, without the aid of ethereal software); helping the software make permanent connections to her mind; helping it connect to her conscious mind (so she can communicate consciously); and learning the right syntax for asking questions.
More recently, Lisa has also been learning to use ethereal software for energy healing. But once you learn to use one piece of ethereal software, learning your second is really just a matter of learning the syntax. She’s mostly done it without my help.
So far, Lisa is focused on interacting with the ethereal software more precisely. She’s been happy with what the software has done, and hasn’t ventured too far into doing magick without ethereal software. That’s how I’d expect it to work for most people: You’ll first learn to use ethereal software, then, when you want to do something the ethereal software can’t do, you’ll start learning to do the magick directly.
On second thought, though, I’m not wild about that model. If you wait until you’re at the very limits of what the ethereal software can do before you learn to do magick directly, it’s going to feel like a huge setback. So many tasks that used to be easy will become hard, and it would be easy to get disheartened. I think it’s better to at least learn to watch what the ethereal software does as you go, so that it’s a bit less work when you eventually need to do all of it yourself. Watching the ethereal software will also help you understand what you’re doing, what the ethereal software can’t do for you, and let you push those limits a bit even before you can do a whole technique directly.
Comments
Does that sound like a book you’d like to read? Any requests or thoughts? Thanks.
Next
There’s one more form of the book that I like to write. I’m going to outline that this weekend, then put together a single, unified outline next week (including all the topics we discussed earlier), which will drive a lot of my posts for the next 6 months or so. Stay tuned.
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Sounds pretty well, the begining of the “Direct Mage” style, XP.
Then, the order of the lessons here in the blog will be different in the book?
Once I work out a proper outline, I’m going to post the chapters in that order. But yes, it will probably be different than the current step by step guide.