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Last time we discussed visualization and why I don’t use it, I talked about asking my mental muscles to do this and directing them to do that. Today, let’s wrap up this series by discussing my 3 approaches to asking and directing my mental muscles: Words, diagrams, and (when I’m sloppy) visualizations.
Words
To connect to Lisa, I’ll think the words, “connect to Lisa,” while thinking of the feel of her energy signature. (If you’ve never thought of a signature, think of it like remembering the scent of a flower: Hard to put into words, but clear in your memory.) Words are great for common, simple tasks, particularly:
- Tasks I’ve done a million times that require zero focus, like connecting to people and ethereal software.
- Tasks my mental muscles simply know how to do, like checking my shielding for openings. If the mental muscles know how to do something better than my conscious mind does, I don’t even bother trying to guide the details.
- When communicating with spirits and ethereal software, I think the messages in words.
Remember, the magick isn’t in the words, and there’s nothing special about the phrases I use. The magick is in engaging your mental muscles. I just use words to communicate my intent to them.
So, words are great for simple or heavily-practiced tasks. But for more complex or detailed work, I need something more expressive: Diagrams.
Diagrams
Last time, I talked about taking a small step, then listening to my mental muscles to see how that step changed the external world. I often “see the change” as a diagram, showing me the paths, signatures, and other magickal forms my mental muscles are working with. And I can then use that diagram as I direct the next step.
For example, when I do energy healing, I’ll engage my mental muscles for physical effects, then touch the person, think about wanting to see the energy of their tissues, and receive a diagram of the tissues, from skin to muscle to tendons to bone, each with a different feel to denote healthy vs inflamed vs another energy signature. I’ll then use this diagram for the rest of the healing session, with my mental muscles updating it as I go.
To zoom in on a particular tissue, I focus on that tissue in the diagram. There are no words involved, just focus. If I had to explain the feeling, it’s a bit like mentally double-clicking on the diagram.
To do the healing technique, I might think the words, “What signature would you recommend for this tissue?” while focusing on the tissue in the diagram. My mental muscles would zoom in on the tissue, and show me which signatures are applied to which spots. As I focus on each spot, I can feel the signature, and I can adjust it based on that feel, or move some signatures to different spots. Then I approve the signature, and the healing energy starts. Depending on the situation, there are a lot of different techniques from here, but it’s all the same pattern: My mental muscles show me a diagram, which I manipulate to guide the magick.
Why Diagrams Aren’t Visualizations
Aren’t diagrams just images in my head? How are they different than visualizations? Simple: Diagrams correspond to magickal forms in the external world, and visualizations don’t.
Visualizations come from your imagination, based on symbols and correspondences and abstractions. You create the visualization before you do any magick, and often use the same visualization for multiple healing sessions with multiple people (or doing other similar-but-not-identical-magick). So, the visualization is unlikely to correspond to the actual forms your mental muscles are manipulating. It’s a single, static image, designed to convey your overall intent — visualizations aren’t a dynamic feedback mechanism.
But a diagram comes from the external world. After your mental muscles connect to the thing you’re magicking (that’s a word, right?), they create a diagram representing the specific forms in the external world. Every line in the diagram corresponds to an actual connection, and every region corresponds to an actual signature. You can select individual connections in the diagram, and it’ll correspond to an individual connection in the external world. And you can adjust a signature in a diagram, and your mental muscles can translate that into a specific change to a single signature in the external world.
A visualization is like sitting in a room with the blinds closed, trying to draw a map of a city you’ve never seen. A diagram is like walking the streets, and drawing a map as you go.
Another analogy: Imagine you’re a doctor, using a surgical robot. A diagram is like the live feed from the robot’s camera, showing you what the robot actually sees, minute by minute, giving feedback on each action you take. In contrast, a visualization would be like a single, unchanging image of the robot doing some surgery on another patient.
Visualizations
But despite all this, I do occasionally use visualizations. And each time, I’m reminded why I avoid them.
Recently, for a healing session for a friend with PTSD, I had to break some connections, then prevent the connections from re-forming by locking the paths those connections followed. (Imagine wires going through a pipe — the wires are the connections, and the pipe is the path.) I went through three visualizations:
- Symbolic: I imagined a padlock on each path. This felt fine, but then I checked the results with another diagram, and saw that it didn’t work.
- Literal (but inaccurate): I imagined a glowing band tied around each path, which also didn’t work. I realized, it guided my mental muscles to try to add something to the paths to seal them, which is the wrong way to do it.
- Literal (and accurate): I used the wire-in-a-pipe image, and imagined twisting the wires inside the pipe, so they couldn’t reconnect. This worked well.
That wire-pipe visualization came from work on connections in 2003. It corresponds well to how paths and connections actually work, so it works well for directing my mental muscles. But it would have been much simpler to just use the diagram, rather than messing around with visualizations.
So why did bother with visualizations? It wasn’t a conscious choice. I was focusing on finding all the paths that needed to be locked, and “lock the connection” sounded so simple that I barely thought about it. But if I had, I would have used a diagram, found the right solution faster, and maybe even locked the paths more thoroughly than I did.
Comments
That’s the end of the series. Leave any questions / thoughts / other comments below.
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: Mental Muscles, Visualization
Hi Mike.
I did enjoy this post.
I felt some of your previous posts where interesting but a little vague in the “how to” department: engage your muscle, use them for this, for that, etc.
It would be nice to have more detailed explanations like you just did, to know how each steps feels.
It would be nice if your book would be “accessible” to many peoples.
Maybe some steps come naturaly 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.
It would be of use if you would clearly explain which steps has to be taken and most importantly what you see/feel after each one. That way we would know what to expect and if we are doing things right.
I think your “connect to Lisa” explanation is a good start. The “energy signature” of a person/place/object/situation is something I can feel/identify/remember/imagine easily.
However, what you call a “diagram” is still vague in my head.
I can easily imagine pictures/movies in my mind. Lets call this imagination/visualization.
But how does a diagram looks/feel like?
I think I understand that visualization is something I imagine that doesn’t exist and a diagram would be a representation of the building blocks of our physical reality that I would receive from my mental muscles. An alteration of this diagram would directly affect the situation.
Is my understanding right?
Unfortunately I haven’t really experience that yet, I suppose my mental muscles are not communicating back to me.
You wrote: “I often ‘see the change’ as a diagram”
What do you mean by “see”?
Do you keep your eyes close while doing an healing and see lines representing some sort of blue prints or do you see pictures?
I once made a small ritual for a job and while doing it I “received” some picture of the office in my head. I didn’t imagine the office but it came of nowhere and got pictured in my head and later I realized it looks quite similar to the real office I ended up working in.
Would you consider this a “two way communication”?
Would you consider this a diagram?
I am curious about how a diagrams looks like in your mind.
also..
I am wondering if you would consider this diagram to be part of the mental,astral or etheric plane?
Many years ago, in 1995, I read an ebook about astral projection called do_obe ( available by googling ).
At the time I had no knowledge at all about magick, I was just interesting in trying to astral project yet while doing so I had an intuition that I could affect my consciousness by altering what I was seing.
It was not a part of the astral plane that looks like photos/movies but it was all dark with colored formation lines, a little bit like an old vector video game.
Altering this world with my intention in mind created nearly immediate positive ( hopefully ) changes in my everyday life.
To be honest I have no clue how I did, it was a totally intuitive process and since I am trying to replicate.
I wonder if what you call a diagram looks like what I have just described?
Also I am curious how the feedback from the ethereal software feels/look like to you.
I beleive I read in an earlier post that you would get a message like “ready to go” once the software was ready or that you could ask what the software could do, have a list of instructions and things like that.
I wonder how that looks like?
I mean do you see a “prompt” in your mind or do you receive a feeling/etc?
I am sorry if my questions/comments are a little blunt but I am highly interested in what you are doing yet I still feel little feedback from the software ( yet I did get quite a headache the other day, maybe I’ll talk about it on another post ). More information on what to expect would be of great help.
Thanks
PS: Sorry about my spelling, I am French.
Great to see you so excited by this. Thanks!
I’ll reply to the “baby steps explanation” request soon. It’s an interesting way to explore some of what I do.
Re: Your understanding of visualization:
I think I understand that visualization is something I imagine that doesn’t exist and a diagram would be a representation of the building blocks of our physical reality that I would receive from my mental muscles. An alteration of this diagram would directly affect the situation.
Yes, that’s basically correct. However, altering the diagram doesn’t directly alter the situation, but rather communicates to your mental muscles the precise steps you’d like them to take to alter the external world. Until your mental muscles do the work, altering an image in your head is just altering an image, not altering the external world.
Sorry, I won’t be able to get to the other questions for a while. It’s a bit overwhelming to have so many all at once. But I am glad you’re so excited by this, and I hope this answer helped you.