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Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.
This week, I practiced extending my space, then encountered resistance and did nothing else.
We’ve talked about resistance before. The type where you don’t trust your path. The type where you stop daydreaming. Overcoming it with exercise and magick.
This resistance is different. I’ve encountered it before, but haven’t written about it.
Here’s what’s up: There are 5-10 steps to properly sending energy. Increase power (“heat”), create energy particles, extend space, and a bunch of moving energy here and there. No one step is hard, but each takes focus, each is tiring. Doing all of them together? Tiring enough that I find ways of not getting to it.
(There are two other factors here. First, I’m about to start another computer consulting gig, so I’m distracted. Second, the full technique requires someone else to send energy to, and if I kind of want to be distracted out of practicing, well, that’s easier with a friend around. But if I didn’t want to be distracted, I would have done the work already.)
I don’t have a set answer to this resistance. But I can see something of a path. If I were better at each individual step, I’d be less intimidated by the whole technique. And if the only hard, focus-requiring part was extending my space, I wouldn’t have resistance.
It turns out, extending my space is only required for energy effects in others. My body is already my own space, so energy effects on myself only require increasing power and creating energy. Which lets me split the problem in half, and lets me practice a useful technique. (Much easier than practicing because I ought to practice.)
So my goal for next week is to practice energy effects on myself until they’re easy and automatic. Once I’m there, I’ll use those now-easy steps as the building block of a new, larger technique to send that energy to others.
Hopefully next Friday’s post will be titled Embracing the Grind. Wish me luck!
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: My Work This Week, Resistance
Embracing the grind – can’t wait!
Yes, your space is already located around your body, probably extending out into what you call your “personal space/sphere” normally – which is what maybe leads to “too close” feelings during some personal interaction I think.
Thanks!
In terms of those “too close” feelings, I think those are proprioception. That’s the psychological sense we have of where our bodies are and what’s around them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
But we can test it. My testing shows that, if you eliminate the ordinary senses, non-mages don’t feel movement around them. Mages feel movement, but only if both parties take extra steps. https://magickofthought.com/2014/04/can-we-feel-auras-my-work-april-12-18/
I’d love to have more folks involved in testing. Would you like to test it and post your results? Thanks!
Yes –
Accepted notions of “proprioception” involve an inferred multi-modal image from physical senses plus recent past sensory experience, stored.
But by “feeling out” you can sense things directly. You can try this with a partner where, eyes closed, you attempt to intuit their movement, etc, avoid their strikes – and this seems to work by “extending your space” to the location you are trying to sense, and stopping all “holding on” so that your responses arise directly from the environment. I’ve played with it before.
The important thing to realise/conclude: Our sense of what’s happening comes from our current sphere of awareness, plus inferences. Mages know that we can extend that sphere beyond the commonly-assumed limits, and so have a more direct experience, with less inference.
Non-mages assume no sphere, even though actually they always have an extent of about a metre or so, unless suffering psychological problems / shyness. They don’t tend to notice how much of what they do arises extra-directly-sensory.
Oblique, but fun:
http://www.sheldrake.org/research/sense-of-being-stared-at
Hi George, this is straying off-topic. I think the phrase “extending my space” is throwing you off. I’m using ‘space’ as a special term, meaning “the fabric of magick that connections and energy flow through,” like the curved space-time of general relativity. You’re talking about focusing or opening your awareness, which is a different thing.
In terms of anticipating strikes, I expect that’s a combination of sensing energy, hearing footfalls, and recognizing patterns of attacks. So it’s a combination of magick and ordinary perception. The first step in incorporating that phenomenon into a science of magick would be to isolate the magickal part, so we’re only talking about sensing energy, and not about hearing footfalls or anything else. You can see my quick-and-dirty testing in the 2nd link of my previous comment.
Yes, I am blurring the two things, you’re right, and we did actually cover this earlier – I came to the conclusion that magickal space might be ‘magickal material/objects’ in extended awareness space – i.e. extending awareness isn’t in and of itself magick, of course.
Non-mages might feel ‘presence’ but they don’t sense other ‘magickal aspects’; that requires training and focusing.