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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.
Just as most systems of magick use external forces, most systems have techniques to engage the internal parts of a person’s mind that drive magick, ranging from ritual to trance to simply believing your magick will work. The point is simple: Communicate your intent to your unconscious, where those magick-driving parts live, and let them contact the ethereal software or do whatever else they do to make that intent happen. Many systems simply call those parts, “the unconscious,” while silently acknowledging that there are other parts of the unconscious that aren’t responsible for magick.
In direct magick, we learn to make those magick-driving parts of the mind conscious, which lets us watch them as they work, and guide them through new techniques. And, since they aren’t unconscious anymore — and, as it turns out, they behave quite differently than the rest of the unconscious mind — we need a new term: Ethereal muscles.
Think about it this way: Engaging your leg muscles makes the difference between imagining moving vs actually walking. Engaging your ethereal muscles makes the difference between imagining a change vs actually causing it. Like your ordinary muscles, you can strengthen ethereal muscles with exercise, and like all your muscles, if you genuinely believe they won’t work, you probably won’t be able to move them. (Ever seen someone hypnotized to believe their legs are limp? Exactly.)
While ethereal software does the complex work to make magick happen, ethereal muscles are what turns a thought in your brain into the first movements of magick, contacting the ethereal software and otherwise starting the process. Unlike ethereal software, which many people share, each person has their own ethereal muscles. I can’t use yours, and you can’t use mine.
Having worked with ethereal muscles for over a decade, it turns out, they’re not part of the brain. They are ethereal structures themselves, like energy or spirits, not ordinary physical matter like cells. We can connect them to different parts of the brain: Visual areas (to see auras), auditory areas (to hear messages), and areas for conscious thought (to consciously direct the ethereal muscles). We can also use magick to awaken hibernating ethereal muscles, and to strengthen atrophied ones.
(Note that, in my writing, “mind” refers to all of a person’s cognitive functions, including ethereal muscles, while “brain” refers specifically to their nerve cells.)
In this book, we’ll learn to engage our ethereal muscles and use them to contact ethereal software. In Book 2, we’ll learn to use our ethereal muscles to improve the results from that software, and in Book 3, we’ll learn to do magick using only our muscles (without any software), which is useful for building new techniques that your software doesn’t understand yet.
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Tags: Book Chapters, Definitions, Mental Muscles