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Last post, we discussed how magick must have some underlying mechanics, and how you could take any step and break it down into substeps. This has an equally-obvious correllary:
Your mind is naturally good at some parts of magick, but not others.
Any part of magick that works simply by thinking about it, like moving energy through your body, is one of those parts that comes naturally. Your mind simply knows how to make it happen, and you can let everything happen unconsciously. It’s like walking.
Now, think of an aspect of magick that was hard at first — tiring, unsuccessful, just plain difficult. Manifesting, maybe. It took you a month or a year of practice, trying the technique again and again, until it became accurate and easy.
You’re probably expecting me to say this is one of the unintuitive parts of magick, but no: That one came naturally, too. Not as naturally as moving energy, and definitely not easily, but it was something your mental muscles basically knew how to do, and just needed some practice. Like throwing a ball, it takes time to build up accuracy, but it’s basically intuitive.
The problem with explaining unintuitive magick is that almost no one does it, so we don’t have easy examples. In the technical sense, unintuitive magick involves procedures that your mental muscles don’t already know and wouldn’t stumble upon. Procedures where your mental muscles don’t even know how to do the substeps, so you have to consciously figure out a series of sub-substeps that work, step through those until you can do the substeps, and then practice the technique as a whole.
For a physical analogy, I can only think of walking upside-down on your hands, because nothing about that seems intuitive to me. You have to train your body to get upside down, to balance upside down, to balance briefly on one hand, to shift your weight, and then you can put that all together into walking on your hands.
Hopefully, unintuitive magick is more useful. (We’ll discuss that tomorrow. It is.)
But the point is, there will be some techniques you can only find by consciously figuring out the sub-substeps, then training those until you learn the substeps, and only then doing the technique. This, too, is hopefully an obvious extension of the idea that magick involves steps, substeps, sub-substeps, and so on, getting substeps as small as you like.
Other posts in this series:- Visualization is Overrated (August 25, 2012)
- The Many Substeps of Magick (August 25, 2012)
- Some Magick Won't Come Naturally (August 28, 2012)
- Why We Need Unintuitive Magick (August 29, 2012)
- Directing vs Perceiving Magick (September 2, 2012)
- Visualizations Direct (But Don't See) Magick (September 3, 2012)
- What I Do Instead of Visualization (September 5, 2012)
- The 3 Ways I Direct My Mental Muscles (September 8, 2012)
- How I Develop New Techniques (September 12, 2012)
Tags: Models