You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
I’m planning this as my new front page. What do you think? Did I succeed in being more personal and less sales-y?
Hi, I’m Mike Sententia. In the early 90s, I set out to answer two questions:
- Why do so many systems of magick — from Thelema to Reiki to psychic intuitions — produce such similar results: Manifesting, energy healing and a few others?
- What happens after your ritual or visualization to actually drive the change in the world?
As a teen in a strict atheist household, I couldn’t research Hermetics, Chaos Magick, or other established styles. (This was the early days of AOL.) So, I wound up developing a new style from the ground up.
I started by telling stories about how magick might work. Maybe connections behave this way, maybe energy behaves that way. A story for each building block. I was just guessing at first, but with each story, I’d develop a new technique. When it worked, I’d explore those building blocks further. When it didn’t, I’d removed that part from my model, and tell a different story.
Twenty years later, I have a useful model. It focuses on consciously guiding magick’s building blocks as they produce the desired change, rather than using rituals, symbols or focused intent to broadcast your goal, then letting your unconscious figure out how to make that goal happen. I call it “direct magick,” since we directly interact with the building blocks.
Direct magick ignores a lot of standard magick practices. Chaos magick tells you to forget what your sigils mean, but direct magick strives to make everything conscious. Most styles use rituals, but direct magick hardly uses any. I didn’t set out to be contrarian, but this is the natural consequence of developing everything from a fresh start. That’s what I mean by “rebooting magick.”
You can use direct magick as your only style of magick, or combine it with other styles. I love exploring new models with readers, so please don’t be shy.
These days, in addition to exploring my two questions, I have a few other projects:
- Developing magick results on par with modern medicine and other sciences. I call those results “genuinely amazing,” to contrast them with results that are amazing only because we secretly expected nothing, and got enough to show ourselves that magick is real. It’s a work in progress, but I’ve developed some promising preliminary techniques.
- Figuring out how to teach direct magick through writing, rather than just in person, and turning that into a book. (You’ll find a lot of that writing on this blog.)
- Long-term, I intend to build magick into a mature, respectable discipline, so we can merge magick with medicine and the other sciences, get thousands of researchers involved, and make everyone’s lives better.
Interested? Here’s how to get started:
- What direct magick is, in a minute or less.
- What mages actually do (not what’s in movies).
- The major moving parts of direct magick.
- The step by step guide to learning direct magick.
- Come back for a new post every day. (Or sign up for RSS or email updates.)
(Note: I’ll probably rewrite a lot of those posts, too.)
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Definitions, PersonalStory
“Long-term, I intend to build magick into a mature, respectable discipline, so we can merge magick with medicine and the other sciences, get thousands of researchers involved, and make everyone’s lives better.”
I think THIS is the best and hardest part of what you are about. As you say, however, it is a long game.
I don’t want to derail you with an obscure or tangential theoretical question, but it cuts to the heart of what I think you think you want to do, and how you talk about it. Actually Mike, I am with you 100% and I have no doubt that you will succeed, just not in the way you might envision it. So my tangential theoretical question is, do you assume that magick is a science like medicine – or a technology at least – like any other technology for “doing things?” I know, I know, we got into this before, on the differences between magick and science and religion and such. But my question gets to the point: in pursuing this project and its fresh start, isn’t your starting place the fact that you are creating a methodology for a “new” science?
(and how do you code for html in this blog? I could use a few italics and bolds here and there, lol)
Yes, I see magick as a very immature field of science, with potential technology applications and all. When I was doing the quartz testing, for example, I was really excited by the possibility of connecting electricity to magick because it would allow a computer to interface with ethereal software, which would be an awesome technology long-term for getting more people involved in magick research. To me, it’s definitely a science, not a religion.
Edit: You probably wanted to know how to add bold and italics to comments. Bold is <strong> and italics is <em>. You can just type it in the comments field.
This is good practice and reading, and I don’t want to wait for the book. Can you link me back to the quartz testing exercises? (Or should I just search for it under quartz, duh.) This is the sort of “do it yourself” stuff that will really excite your readers, especially those who are into magickal experiments.
thanks for the html help.
Thanks Yvonne. It sounds like you figured it out, but here’s the quartz series:
https://magickofthought.com/2012/02/experiments-with-orgone/