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Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.
In Direct Magick, we call the parts of the mind that drive magick ethereal muscles.
Each ethereal muscle does a different job: Communication, guiding energy in the body, sensing others’ energy, recognizing signatures — just about everything I do with magick, actually.
But not quite everything. Some tasks, I don’t have an ethereal muscle for. Instead, I cobble that task together from other ethereal muscles, guided by my conscious mind. But that’s slow, tiring, and doesn’t work if I’m unfocused.
This week, I learned about creating new ethereal muscles to speed up these tasks. And, perhaps, to increase intelligence and other benefits.
Tasks vs Techniques
A bit of terminlogy:
Full techniques, like energy healing, are too big for one ethereal muscle. Techniques are generally guided consciously.
But in this post, we’re talking about small tasks, like connecting to that injured tissue, or recognizing its signature. Tasks are the building blocks of techniques.
Here’s an analogy: Imagine you’re painting, with a brush on canvas. That’s a technique. The tasks might be holding the brush, moving your arm, and looking at the model. And if you want to focus on the overall technique of painting, it’s important that you don’t have to consciously think about flexing your fingers to hold the brush or moving your eyes to see the model, right?
That’s what we’re doing here: Letting ethereal muscles handle tasks (without conscious focus), so we can focus on the larger techniques (like energy healing).
Feeling My Whole Aura
For the past months, I’ve been working on aura. Why are we talking about ethereal muscles now?
Here’s the thread I’m following: Last week, I embedded sensory connections throughout my aura. This week, I practiced looking around aura, noticing my energy signatures throughout the day and getting used to taking it all in.
Then I hit a snag: I could sense the signature in any particular part of my body anytime, even if I was tired. But to assemble an overall picture of my whole body’s energy, I had to be awake and focused.
Minor problem, but annoying enough that I thought about it. And I realized, I was assembling that picture using my brain, rather than my ethereal muscles. (I also confirmed this with the spirits I work with.)
The solution? Create a new ethereal muscle that assembles that picture.
Why Bother?
Part of me thinks this is a distraction.
I’ve been assembling the picture in my brain. That’s been working fine. Sure, it’s nice to be able to do magick while tired, but it’s not really necessary. Maybe it’s better to keep going with aura and creating a technique to cause sensations in most people.
I pondered this Wednesday, during work breaks. There are two reasons to create the new ethereal muscle:
Short-term, off-loading this task will free up my limited brain focus for other things. That will make it easier to learn to work with my aura, and to learn more complex techniques too. And to do those techniques while unfocused.
And long-term, I want to offload more tasks to my ethereal muscles. Some magick functions seem simple and useful, like energy healing for inflamed muscles.
But what if we could also use ethereal muscles for non-magick functions? What if an ethereal muscle could interact with my visual centers to improve visual recall? Or interact with my logical centers to keep track of details as I think through business decisions? Or step in when my brain is tired to help me think clearly and be patient with an upset friend? What if we could augment the brain with magickal resources, like how sci-fi cyborgs augment their brains with computer equipment?
And you know the sci-fi trope of uploading a person into a computer AI, so their mind lives after their body dies? Well, what if we can upload an entire mind into ethereal muscles?
I don’t know if any of these ideas will pan out. Maybe none will. Maybe it’ll lead to something else. But this is how I think about magick, and why I think it’s so worth exploring.
Next week we’ll discuss the actual technique.
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