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Last time, we discussed my two bad plans. I knew they were bad, and I knew I had to sit with the problem until I created something good. That really is my recipe: Take a block of time, load as much of the problem as I can into my mind, see where the gaps are, and something will come to me. But between the surgery, packing, and saying goodbye to everybody, I just hadn’t found that block of time.
Then came my flight to LA. Sometimes, boredom is the mother of invention. Especially when you’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the problem, and by everything else.
It started with a question: How does the tingling sensation move from magick::energy to nerve cells? I saw two options:
Energy influences the nerves in my arm –> The signal goes up those nerves to my brain, like any normal feeling.
OR
Energy touches my arm –> My mental muscles notice the energy –> My mental muscles send a message to my brain.
In other words, is a tingle in my arm caused by the nerves in my arm, or is it projected into my mind, similar to how visions work, or how spirits can drop thoughts into your mind when they communicate?
I didn’t have an answer. It’s not the sort of thing you can reason out, because it could go either way. The only way to know is to test it.
Step 1: Observation
Before I could design the test, I needed to know what I was working with. What are the major moving parts, and how do I think they work? What’s the hypothesis? To answer that, I connected to my arm, my mind, and the arm and mind of a non-mage, to see what the differences were.
I started with the nerves in my arm, tracing the paths from energy layer to nerve cells. (Well, as close as I could get to the actual cells.) It was just a normal-looking set of paths, the same ones I work with all the time for energy healing. Later, when I looked at the non-mage’s nerves, he had the same paths. In other words, there was nothing unusual going on in the nerves in my arm.
Then, I looked at my mind. There were three components: Thinking mind, energy layer, and physical nerves. The energy layer and physical nerves are basically the same as the nerves in my arm, then thinking mind goes on top of them.
(Thinking mind is the layer used for communicating with spirits and ethereal software. They can read thoughts from it and write their responses to it. When I asked my trainers what it was, their concepts came through as “thinking mind,” which is how I got the term.)
I also looked at the non-mage’s mind, which had the same 3 layers. But there was a big difference: My thinking mind was more active, and had much bigger connections to the energy layer.
Don’t read too much into this. This doesn’t mean that I’m smarter, that my mind is more active, or anything like that. Thinking mind is a magickal structure used in magick. It’s involved in in sensing energy and connections, and in communication. As you learn those skills, I would expect this magickal structure to become more developed. I just want to be clear, when I say “my thinking mind was more active than his,” I’m not disparaging his cognative abilities in any way.
OK, back to the magick. So, we know that the magickal forms around the nerves in my body are basically the same as a non-mage’s, but my thinking mind, and its connections to the energy layer of the brain, are quite different. This gave me a hypothesis: The sensations associated with energy originate in mental muscles, move from thinking mind to brain, and do not involve the nerves in my arm (or wherever I’m feeling the tingle). After having zero traction on this problem for two weeks, I was pretty excited. But I had to test it first.
Step 2: Test it
We tested the model by seeing how to turn off the tingling sensation. If the path goes:
Mental muscles –> Thinking mind –> Nerves
Then we should be able to turn off the tingling sensation by blocking either the connections between mental muscles and thinking mind, or the connections between thinking mind and nerves. In contrast, if the path goes:
Energy –> Nerves in my arm –> Ordinary nerve signaling until the feeling reaches my brain
Then blocking the messages from mental muscles and thinking mind shouldn’t have any effect, because the message enters my brain through normal neural signalling.
At my request, my trainers blocked each set of connections (mental muscles –> thinking mind, and thinking mind –> brain). It was easy for them to do. And in both cases, it turned off the tingling sensation. The testing confirmed my earlier observations, and now we have a model: The tingling sensation is caused by mental muscles placing sensations into thinking mind, in much the same way as visions and messages are placed directly into thinking mind. The actual nerves in your body at the location of the tingling are not involved.
For now, it’s a tentative model, since there could be some other possibility I haven’t thought of. Once we develop the tingling technique based on this model, I’ll call it confirmed.
Why It Matters
For anyone casually following this blog, it might seem like I’m splitting hairs. Why do I care so much?
First, all of my previous research had focused on the nerves in the arm. I was imagining to cause tingling by applying the right energy to those nerves, in the same way I do energy healing by applying the right energy signature to the nerves experiencing the pain. But now, I know that focusing on the arm was unlikely to yield a success, and that I must instead focus on the mind.
Second, I have plenty of trainers, but if no one knows how to cause a non-mage to feel energy, I can’t ask for training in that. But now, I know to ask for training in the connections between thinking mind and brain, and I’m already in touch with an expert in that field. So, having this model tells me what to learn and how to learn it.
Third, it once again showed me the importance of good terms. Did you notice how I kept talking about the “energy layer of the nerves” in this post? I used to call that “thought layer,” because it reflects the moment-to-moment signalling of the nerves. But “thought layer” sounds a lot like “thinking mind,” and I hadn’t been able to keep those two completely different structures straight in my own thinking. If I’d had better terms, I probably would have checked this weeks ago.
So, coming up, I’ll make some better terms, get training in the connections between thinking mind and brain, and then come back to developing this technique. Also, now that I’m mostly over my jetlag, I’ll get back to writing the book.
Question for you, as readers: Is it interesting to see what my work actually involves, or are you lost in all the technical jargon, or otherwise uninterested? I’m fine either way, just want to make sure my writing is helping you, or at least entertaining you. Thanks!
Other posts in this series:- Why Non-Mages Don't Feel Energy (July 9, 2012)
- How We Cheat at Feeling Energy (July 11, 2012)
- Magick Anyone Can Feel: Why It's Hard (July 20, 2012)
- Magick Anyone Can Feel: First (Bad) Plans (July 21, 2012)
- Magick Anyone Can Feel: Testing it Out (July 24, 2012)
Tags: Energy, My Research, Non-Mages, Thinking Mind
Yes, these posts are very interesting, this one in particular.
Yes, I do get lost in all the technical jargon. The only way to overcome that is for the reader to keep reading until he “gets it” or for the writer to find less jargonistic terms. Since the concepts you are trying to convey fall outside of everyday usage that would be hard to do. I have a problem relating to the term “mental muscles” and I find “system” more understandable than “ethereal software” but I am only one person and it is your book. If the reader keeps reading and the writer keeps writing eventually communication will occur.
Thanks Carl, that’s good feedback. And good to know that some of the basic terms aren’t quite landing — I’ll be sure to include some exercises in the book to help you get experience with them before I assume anyone really gets the terms. Thanks for keeping it up and working through the terms, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the posts.
Yes, it’s interesting watch the Direct Magick techniques for investigation purposes!
Then, the mental muscles communicates with the nerves through thinking mind, the “energy layer of the nerves” is the connection between thinking mind and the nerve cells? Or is a different layer non- thinking mind related, or the thinking mind and the nerve cells share the same layer?
“Then, the mental muscles communicates with the nerves through thinking mind, the “energy layer of the nerves” is the connection between thinking mind and the nerve cells?”
Yes, exactly. You got the terms right, and I know that’s no small feat with me. Good job.
See, to me this just sounds like what you’ve discovered is the power of suggestion. That’s essentially all a hypnotist does – he or she suggests to the subject that they will feel X, and they then perceive it. It all happens in the “thinking mind,” not in the nerves themselves. The thing is, this has been known for decades in experimental psychology. I think at this point you need to be very careful that you are not conflating magical training and/or aptitude with suggestibility, which varies throughout the human population.
I’d be a lot more convinced by your psychic impressions of non-mages if there was anything to them that was remotely verifiable. Even a double-blind test, where you would connect to a set of unknown individuals, record your impressions, and then checked to see if your impressions corresponded with whether or not they practiced magick would be profoundly helpful. That sort of research is admittedly dull and repetitive, but the reason scientists do it is so that they can be sure of the foundations on which their hypotheses are grounded.
Ananael, always here to keep me honest. I’d expect nothing less from you.
Indeed, there are a number of ways I could confirm this model. Personally, I usually stick with a tentative model as I develop the technique (in this case, tingling that even non-mages can feel), then I test the technique. If the technique works, then I count the model as confirmed, too.
Why does verifying the technique confirm the model? Because I and other mages have tried and failed to produce these results when we used other models. (That’s why we have so many cheating ways to make someone feel tingles via breathing and visualization — doing it without cheating is hard.) So, the technique is a prediction of the model, and once you verify the prediction, that confirms the model (with the possibility of refinements in the future).
I work from a preliminary model for speed reasons. I’d rather make a few missteps quickly than slow my work down to verify each step along the way. In the end, my sensory connections are right most of the time, and I get a lot more done thanks to the speed.
[…] I made myself slow down. Explained ethereal muscles before discussing communication. Talked about referred sensations from imagination before discussing the tingles that come from energy. Stepped her through each idea […]