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This morning, as the final step of recovering from the anesthesia, I reconnected my mental muscles to my brain. I’d only expected it to re-enable my magick: Sensing energy and connections, talking with spirits and ethereal software, and so on. But it went well beyond that.
Reconnecting with my mental muscles made me more focused and less emotional, in a good way. I don’t mean “not feeling emotions,” but rather, tempering insecurities and worries with a more accurate view of the world, shutting down unhealthy dwelling on problems, and generally being less overwhelmed by my emotions. It made me more able to sit down and work, more ready to write and research and do the heavy mental lifting required to make something worth making. It returned me to who I normally am, even though I didn’t realize I’d lost it.
And that’s the surprising thing: When my mental muscles were disconnected, I only noticed the technical magick parts missing. I didn’t even notice the change to my thinking. It was only once everything returned to normal, and I was once again aware of stray thoughts and unhealthy emotions, that I noticed how different I am without my magick facilities.
I recall, as a teen, wondering if studying magick was worthwhile. I couldn’t do any really useful abilities, and focusing on sports would certainly have made me happier. But every time I stopped, I could feel a bit of smartness slipping away. That was the only word I had for it at the time: Smartness. But now, I’m sure it was the focus and rationality I’m talking about now.
(Funny, how we can remember words we wrote from 20 years ago, but not the actual sensation. Another example of how we truly think in words.)
And so, this is one of my deepest and most-neglected reasons for studying magick: Because it makes me better. It makes me more focused, more in control of my emotions, more capable and driven, and generally, into a person I much prefer to be. And I’m wondering, is this a common experience among other mages?
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It certainly has been transformative for me. Very. Hugely. But I’ve tended to see the transformation less as me making myself into a new and better person than as losing the clutter of crap that I mistakenly thought was an important part of me and my life.
Just for example, there was an angry me who was always offended by this and that and dwelling on resentments. It wasn’t that I controlled that anger or banished it or anything like that. It was that the habit of reacting faded away – the reactions were gradually recognized as a kind of unnecessary and habitual mental spin based on feeling a need to defend myself from perceived attacks and try to keep a wall between myself and things I feared. Over the course of time (with a heavy meditation practice and devotional and magickal work), I simply wasn’t afraid of those things anymore. They didn’t really hurt me, there wasn’t anything to fear. If someone else said something “offensive” they were just expressing their own suffering, the way an injured dog might bite at you. So rather than being afraid and that leading to defensiveness and anger, it just seems okay to be patient and compassionate. So the same scenarios that used to piss me off simply don’t.
On a practical level that means I can be very supportive and helpful to others who are having a hard time, and I also find that when other people are upset, they tend to calm down quickly when I don’t react to it. And then they show a sort of relief and become more friendly and helpful. (One example was when I went into a mobile phone shop and the clerk was really harried and stressed out. Clearly he expected me to be pissed off because I had to wait 20 minutes for something. He was waiting for me to start tearing into him. I honestly didn’t mind standing there for 20 minutes at all. When he realized I wasn’t going to attack him he calmed way down, smiled and relaxed. We chit-chatted in a friendly way. He was then able to do his job more effectively and had a nice moment in his otherwise crappy day.)
In a sense it might have been about using most of my magickal work for a sort of self-healing and for learning to listen to and surrender to the flow of the universe (so to speak), rather than trying to change things to suit my desires. I have done a good bit of practical magick for myself and others, but I always also did a good bit that was just about asking for wisdom and a lot of devotional work, which is more about offering yourself up for transformation.
Hi Ona, I’ve had this page open, to remind me to reply, ever since you wrote it. Love the comment and the story, and how these themes are returning in my current series on enlightenment. Thanks!
(For anyone who finds this post and wants to find the enlightenment series, it’s here https://magickofthought.com/2012/07/direct-magick-for-enlightenment/ )