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Kol asks:
Something I’ve seen in so many personal biographies on using magic / energy sensing — most ‘just happened’ at some point or another and then they are off to the races. I am hoping this next section of ‘initiation’ looks at that critical moment of ‘ah ha’-ness so a person following your procedures can get a clue as to what is going on at ‘that moment’.
I wish there were some epiphany I could package up for readers. Heck, I wish there was simply an amazing moment to tell you about, to inspire you to find your own epiphany. There never was for me, and I don’t think there is for most people.
Here’s what my journey into magick looked like:
Start noticing energy in people, trees, the ocean, etc. Or maybe, start expecting to notice energy, and feeling tingles via placebo. Or maybe both. I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s anyway to find out today what happened those 20 years ago.
Wonder about how magick works: Why do different systems produce similar results? What’s going on under the hood? This part, I did package up for you in my book.
Get bothered by spirits draining my energy. Fight them off. Learn about shielding and making connections and the like. Except, maybe those headaches were just from doing magick wrong, and had nothing to do with spirits. Most likely, both of those happened at various points, but again, I don’t think there’s any way to find out 20 years later.
Attempt a few dozen things that failed. Runes for energy healing: Failed. Thinking about events as real things you can move around: Failed. I’m sure there are more, I don’t remember my work well until I started keeping notes in my 20s.
Eventually, I started to get traction. Ethereal software, which I called “systems” at the time. Breaking an energy signature into smaller sub-units, which is important for sensory connections. More recently, an understanding of communication. There was no one moment where I went from non-mage to mage or from novice to experienced. It was just a series of figuring out little bits, slowly, with lots of failures along the way. Though if I had to pick one skill to mark where I really started to get it, that would be good sensory connections.
That’s why I can’t share my epiphany with you: I never had one. There was no moment, just 20 years of slow progress.
And, wow, that sounds kind of discouraging, doesn’t it? Here’s the thing: My goal isn’t to get you to follow my path. Heck, I don’t even know if it would work again, for me or for anyone else. There was too much luck in the questions I asked and the mentors I met, both human and spirit.
Instead, I’m working to create a new path for my book. But it won’t look like an epiphany, either. Just a more reliable series of exercises, using better tools than I had (particularly the book’s ethereal software). But once we finish debugging that path — that means you and me, dear readers, collaborating to test and debug this — it should help whoever wants to learn magick to do so. Which I think is what Kol is really asking for. We’ll cover this in Part 2 of my book, which should start soon.
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[…] Mike Sentetntia responds to an inquiry about that great “aha” moment that led him to practice magic. […]
And make sure to read the insightful reply on Blacklight Metaphysics: http://blacklightmetaphysics.com/2013/08/22/epiphany/
Its maybe important to take in the significance of what you wrote about the very first step in your journey:
‘Start noticing energy in people, trees, the ocean, etc.’
That would seem to be your moment of going from ‘non mage’ to ‘mage’- the first ‘epiphany’. Its almost odd that you downplay this so much and claim you don’t really remember. Clearly whatever happened when you ‘started noticing energy in people. trees etc’ was strong enough to send you down a path of lifelong inquiry.
Kol’s comment is that people writing on this seem to report that sensing energy etc ‘just happened’. That does indeed seem to be exactly what you are saying – one day you ‘just started noticing this stuff’. Not looking for it or trying to visualize/fantasize about it – just started noticing it.
It actually reminds me that you maybe need to be clear about this – it suggests you are coming from the perspective of a ‘natural sensitive’ for want of a better label. I realize the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘trained’ sensitivity may have a lot of problems but if you read Donna Eden’s biography then here is someone who’s early natural sensitivities were dramatically different to mine – I have had to fight tooth and claw for every inch of increased perception and prior to 29 didn’t have a hint of it. So it would seem you’re nearer the ‘natural sensitive’ end of the scale- which might affect how you think about and present material.
Of course one of the most interesting things you’ve tried to do is to get ‘non mages’ to feel some kind of definite, unmistakable reaction to your ethereal wonder-gizmo. I appreciate it seemed pretty damned hard/impossible to do. But if you were to REALLY pull that off you would be giving many people at the very least minor epiphanies and getting them somewhere near to step 1 – which is what started you off.
I’ll try to keep that in mind. It’s hard — I can only really write from my own experience, but that idea was actually what motivated me to use ethereal software to awaken readers’ ethereal muscles. I just don’t think that “meditate on energy until it works” is a very robust plan.
For my own path, I don’t know when I started feeling energy. I know when I started experiencing the tingles that I expected to feel when touching trees or being inspired by the ocean, but that’s not exactly a rigorous test for feeling energy.
And I’ll return to sensations non-mages can feel eventually. I think we all agree, that would be quite useful.