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Last week, we talked about building new, unintuitive techniques based on substeps our mental muscles already know how to do. Today, I want to talk about how I build those techniques, and answer Barracuda Surf’s question:
Maybe some steps come naturally to you but they may not for everyone. I would enjoy “baby steps for dummies” explanations to try to put in practice and tests your models/theories.
I like this quote because it illustrates the difference between the way I actually develop new techniques, and the way I explained it. Barracuda seems to want a list of all the substeps I use for energy healing, so he can step through the technique and get the same results. But I can’t do that.
The first issue is scale: Energy healing has around 10 steps, starting with finding energy of the injured tissue, which has roughly 10 substeps (connect to various tissues, read signatures, and so on). Each of those has around 10 substeps (making a network of connections to scan an area, quieting those connections so you can sense the energy, etc), and so on. Depending on how basic you want to get, you wind up with 1000 or more steps, and it’s no longer practical to write down, or even use.
But that’s not even the real reason. The real reason is, I can only learn one new technique at the time. Before I could even think about finding the energy of the injured tissue, I had to learn sensory connections. Not just read the series or memorize the steps of the procedure — I had to practice until it became easy and automatic, because otherwise, I would have far too much to keep track of as I did the healing technique.
That series has 5 sets of exercises. The first builds on baby steps, more or less. The 2nd builds on the 1st, and the 3rd builds on the 2nd, and so on. In other words, by the time we use sensory connections, we’re already 5 levels above baby steps. And energy healing builds another 1-2 levels on top of that. It’s just impractical to learn it all at once, and no one would want to read that post.
Very little of direct magick is intuitive at first. At least, that was my experience of it. Most of the techniques I talk about have to be developed, not simply visualized. Knowing the right technique helps, and that’s what I try to give you in this blog and in my books, but each mage still has to practice the techniques until their mental muscles grasp them, one at a time, from baby steps up to useful magick.
Wow, that post was kind of a bummer, huh? All work and no play. Here’s the good news: Magick based on ethereal software is much simpler. I can step you through it in about 150 pages, starting from baby steps. In fact, I’m already writing that book. Look for it around the end of the year, and look for new excerpts to start posting later this week.
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)