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Today, I want to explore why people learn magick. Partly because it will be useful as I plan to magick business and career, and partly because I have writers block and this is the only thing that I seem able to put on paper.
I think there are three reasons, though I might find more as I write this. But the three reasons are power, curiosity, and the feeling of doing magick.
Power
Use magick for wealth, love, sex, etc. We’ve all seen these questions.
Can you use magick that way? Sure. Is it a smart path, if that’s what you want? No. There a lot of easier ways to achieve those goals, and anyone doing magick for material success probably won’t stick with it long enough to get to the good stuff.
Interesting question: Is there a path that will convert some power-seeking novices into people on these other paths? I don’t know, but I’d like your thoughts.
Curiosity
This was my main motivation for years. I could feel all this magical stuff — energy, spirits, and so on — and wanted to understand it. We’ve talked about this a lot, and you can find more about it on my front page.
The Feel of Magick
This is a new idea for me: That people practice magick because it makes them feel awe, a connection with the divine, or something along those lines. This relates to the Enochian work I did recently.
As a teen, I would sometimes get my energy drained by a spirit. My mental muscles would stop working for a day, and I would feel mentally slow. I remember thinking that this must be what it’s like for everyone who doesn’t do magick, and how glad I was that I had magick in my life. A different feeling, but the same sort of idea.
Of course, now, I realize that the mental slowness was a result of being drained, not a result of my mental muscles shutting down temporarily.
This, I think, is something that direct magick lacks. I don’t feel awe when I do magick. I feel interested, intrigued, skilled and proud of it, or something similar, but when I felt the awe from the Enochian angel, I recognized what was going on, and felt a bit tricked.
And so, I’m going to start a new project: Using direct magick to inspire different emotions, in myself and others. Kind of like drugs, in that the energy directly produces the feeling, rather than causing the feeling organically through experience.
What can you do with that? A few things come to mind:
- You can do it on yourself, and feel awesome. I bet it would have lots of fun applications in intimacy and sex, too. (With informed, consenting partners.)
- At a high level of skill, it’s a good way to demonstrate magick: It’s immediate, fun, and non-threatening. Not the kind of thing that would convince an aggressive skeptic, but the kind of thing you could show to someone who’s undecided and get them over that hump.
- Yes, you could use it immorally: Inspire awe and someone while telling them to sign a business deal, or go home with you, or do something else they wouldn’t normally do. Anything powerful enough to be useful is powerful enough to be abused. Thoughts on this, or in how to prevent it?
Once I work out the details, I’ll probably program this into the ethereal software I’m making. Someone new to the style would only be able to trigger emotions in themselves — it would be a cool toy to feel good, rather than a powerful tool to influence people, but that might be enough to get the people in it for power to become interested in learning more. And, as you get to higher levels (which requires some enlightenment work), you would be able to use it more generally.
Manifesting
A closing note: I realized about midway through writing this that manifesting was guiding me to these ideas. There were several times where I wanted to take a break, and got an impulse from manifesting to keep going.
A few weeks ago, I set up my manifesting to always be on, and always guide me to things that are important for me. Essentially, I made myself psychic*. I’m thinking that today was a manifesting-induced writers block, until I got on the topic that wanted me to write about.
*Psychic = Having manifesting that’s always on. That’s really all it is.
I’ll write more about how to become psychic like this soon, too.
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Tags: Emotions, Learning Magick
Sorry to keep bothering you. I think I am addicted to this site.
Why do some spirits drain? Vampirism? I see that some do, others do not.
For example I feel energetically drained after spirit possession by the vodou lwa, whom I guess, are angelic, and even much more so with the Ghede. (these are dead people) Why?
I don’t really like it but apart from taking aspirin and rest, it don’t seem that I can do that much about it if I continue to engage in this kind of spirit work. But I sometimes wonder if this is dangerous to my health.
I am possibly sharing secrets here, so feel free to respond offline.
Hi Yvonne, I’m always glad to hear from you, you’re not bothering me at all. I could do a full post on each question, but let me give you some quick answers here.
Spirits drain because they do not know how to get power through their core properly, or because their core is damaged in some way. (Core connects their power source, which you can think of as their soul, to their mental muscles. So, the improper use or damage causes them to not get enough power to their mental muscles, and they compensate by draining.) While a skilled drainer will be more skilled than an unskilled non-drainer, on average, drainers are less skilled (because knowing how to generate your own energy is important for learning a lot of other things.)
(By the way, that’s based on training I’ve received from spirits, not things I’ve directly experimented with myself.)
In my experience, your feeling of exhaustion is less related to the absolute amount of energy, and more related to the signature of your energy. When a spirit drains, they drain their energy signature, which shifts your signature in the opposite direction. (Imagine you have green paint, and there’s some way to suck the yellow out of it. You wind up with blue, and feel sick.)
To recover quickly:
-Make sure the drain is done, and that you don’t have any connections. See posts tagged “Protection”
https://magickofthought.com/tag/protection/
-Release all the energy you have into the area around you. Do this outside, or at least in a different room than you intend to hang out. Beyond a grounding meditation, you want to open up all the parts of your body to the area around you and release your energy. It’s the opposite of the shielding technique where you close all your connections (the dome visualization in https://magickofthought.com/2010/06/shielding-yourself-the-right-way-for-beginners/).
-Go somewhere else, then build your own energy again. Remember, the problem isn’t amount of energy, it’s signature of energy, so building your own should get you into the right signature.
-Feeling lousy is not directly due to the shifted energy signature, but rather, it’s due to how your cells respond to that signature. The longer you leave it, the slower you’ll recover. (Though we’re still talking 5-15 minutes after doing this procedure, even if you have a killer headache.) But, if you know you’ll need it, like after a voodoo session, do it before you even feel lousy, so you never let the shifted energy set into your cells.
Want a way to thank me? Do a voodoo session, try this technique out, take some notes, and write them up for me as a guest post. (Or let me know if it doesn’t work and I’ll help you debug the technique.)
Guess I’d have to be half curiosity and half feel. Somewhere long ago I read a story where folks went to ‘an astral plane’ where they learned how to ‘make things happen’… all the way up to astral fighting practice and tossing ‘fireballs’. Another spoke of ‘seeing magic’ as threads in the air.. and learning how to grab and tie those threads to make bindings or protections and such. Made me want to ‘see energy’ and to learn how to get to that astral plane to ‘do’ all those cool experiments. Not happened (yet) but still…
My experience is that certain types of spirits thrive on physical energy and attention. This has been true in my experience with earthy African-Diasporic spirits (especially those that are connected to the dead) in that they adore being in the body, enjoying food, drink and other earthly things.
What seems to help is to make sure that the relationship is balanced and healthy. That it is balanced by regular work with “higher” beings (God, angels, deities that balance the more earthy energy with more heavenly energy), energizing and cleansing your own body with ritual baths, prayer and meditation, and a good diet; and making sure that rituals are run cleanly, ended cleanly and appropriate post-ritual closing ceremonies are done.
At large group possession ceremonies there is always a good chance of picking up messiness from other people in attendance, since the trance states leave you very open. I know my own godfathers were very fussy about whose rituals they attended and about doing cleanings before arriving, again on leaving the event and again on arriving home.
Just some thoughts from another paradigm… :)