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For the past week or so, I’ve been working on the new ethereal software for my book. And I’ve been realizing, I really have two styles of magick.
One style is the ethereal software, which you can use for energy healing, manifesting, and other things. It really is its own beast, separate from other established styles: I use sigils differently than most mages, issue commands differently, and a bunch of other things. It is magick stripped down to the basics, like listening to spoken word poetry after getting used to rock and roll. I’m excited about it, because I think it will be an excellent gateway for a lot of novice mages who find the rituals and practices of other styles don’t resonate with them.
And yet, it’s really not what I do myself, in the same way that using your computer is different than programming a computer. My work centers on the programming: Understanding how the ethereal software implements the commands, improving that implementation, and using those same building blocks to create new techniques that solve problems that no one has solved before. That’s really the essence of direct magick, and it’s fairly far from using this ethereal software I’ve made. But it’s so complex, it takes years to develop useful techniques, which is why I made the ethereal software to get you started.
So really, I have two styles of magick. One is this particular ethereal software, and the other is full direct magick. You can move from one to the other, and in fact, using the ethereal software will probably be the most direct route to learning direct magick, because I’m designing it to let you peek under the hood more easily than most other styles. But using my ethereal software isn’t the same as doing direct magick.
Right now, I’m just starting to think about this. Maybe I should make separate names? Maybe I should make separate books, even? Maybe this, maybe that. And I wanted to get your thoughts.
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Every enlightened man in history has had this challenge — how do I teach what I know to the masses. Honestly, I have been doing the same exact thing with my system of Psi-KOMancy and I’m even dividing my Grimoire into four libers of training. The key for me is to focus on two things — exercises and a frame of thought that allows you a road map and a compass to chart your own territory after you have a working corpus developed as a result of the exercises. I have dubbed the beginner’s set of exercises as “Outer Psi-KOMancy” and the true Psi-KOMancy school as “Inner Psychomancy”. I have even created archetypes for the two, that have the outlines the same relationship as The Fool’s journey to become The Magician in the Tarot.
An important thing you need to guard against is people who think that they’re clever enough to cheat the learning curve or put a spin on your school of Magik without knowing enough to do so. This is why I invented the archetypes. Also, I suggest stripping it of metaphors either by coining unique terminology or by explicitly indicating that the metaphors are riddles to be solved by the aspirant and in no other way should they be approached. We only need to take a look at the history of every Magikal Movement in the modern world, from Thelema to Wicca to Chaos Magik to see what happens when revolutionaries don’t take such precautions. The biggest insult to your hard work would be for some schlep who’s never practiced Magik in his life to try to sell Mass Market Paperbacks by half-understanding your system, spouting hir fragmented interpretation mixed with their own ideas (not based on experience) to fill in the blanks. You can call “Ethereal Software” the “Ethereal Software Riddle” and use that term, now that you’re consolidating your system into a book.
Thanks Dark. Good ideas, I’ll keep them in mind. Though, right now, I’d be delighted to be successful enough that people want to borrow my work. But we’ll see what happens as this moves forward.
As I understood it the ethereal software’s main aim is to give people familliar with your blog definite experience of your model of magic in the quickest and most effective way so they can then get to the level of ‘programming’.
For now – and with the kind of readers you seem to have I would say that still holds pretty much true. It MAY completey change in the future and the ethereal software will become something used by people who don’t ever intend to get into ‘programming’.
These things often develop quite organically though- and maybe its too early to try and second guess all that before at least a few more people have engaged with the ethereal software and the pool of users has matured a little bit.
You know, there are really two goals here. Yes, I want to give you a quick path to get up to the level of programming. But the more I write and teach, the more I realize that many people just won’t want to get to that level.
For example, Lisa is perfectly happy doing a little direct magick to make her ethereal software work better, then using the ethereal software for psychic intuitions and healing. I’m most of service to her by developing better ethereal software, teaching her the right commands, and teaching her enough direct magick to make sure it’s working right. If you recall the post on the 3 books, she roughly lives in Book 2.
I think that full direct magick is probably too hard to make a large following. Because it really does take several years to learn full direct magick, to the point where you could program something better than is out there already. So, even for folks who want to learn direct magick, I need to offer something useful within a few weeks or months, so they can see this is a good path.
And long-term, if I want to put together a magick company that does healing (using a consulting model, where we heal you as a service), I’d have a small number of programmers designing techniques, and a larger number of consultants using the ethereal software to perform healings. It really is a different role.
But I think your point is: Everyone here wants to learn direct magick, and inventing a new term for the ethereal-software-based version probably isn’t that important yet. And I agree. I’ll probably think about this more after writing the first book, when I’m deciding on a title, or maybe when I’m writing the introduction. Yeah, that seems like a good time to think about naming.
You can use the both, I mean, using the E. Software and Direct Magic itself, like in the both need sensory connections, recognizing signatures, and even share the develop of same mental muscles (at a certain point) different type of application, but pretty alike.
Maybe down levels have to use E. Software but the cheats, commands and tools are the begin of the Direct application.
Indeed, learning ethereal software, and learning to use it well, are the first steps to learning direct magick. So, they’re not really different styles, just different ways of using the same tools.
Really, I’d like some umbrella term that encompasses both using ethereal software and doing magick directly, and then within that umbrella term, you can do either or both of the methods. Something to keep in the back of my mind as I write other things.