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Today, I’m answering questions I normally don’t consider from a reader new to Direct Magick:
1) What is the difference between spirits and ghost and is it safe to communicate with them?? because what if they are malevolent??
I work with spirits: Ethereal intelligences that never had a body. I think of them as an artificial intelligence, made of ethereal connections and energy, rather than transistors.
Ghosts are disembodied dead people. Or that’s the notion, anyway. Ghosts seem like a rather unlikely hypothesis to me.
To be fair, spirits are a rather unlikely hypothesis, too. But I include spirits in my work because they’ve repeatedly helped me develop effective techniques. In other words, I consider both unlikely, but I have evidence for spirits, while I have no evidence for ghosts.
(To everyone who has experiences with ghosts: I believe your experiences. I believe they are real, and outside contemporary science. I do energy healing that’s outside contemporary science, after all. I just think there’s an explanation that doesn’t involve a person’s mind floating through the world after their brain dies.)
On safety, I see people go to extremes. There’s the view that everything is safe, that nothing can affect you unless you give it permission. This seems like wishful thinking to me. “Permission” is a property of human minds, not of physics, and physics doesn’t distinguish between helpful and harmful events. Anything powerful enough to make a useful change can also harm.
The other extreme is: “Spirits are dangerous. Some are demons. They create madness and illness and misfortune. Be careful, learn the historically-trusted methods, and don’t go wandering in the woods.” It’s too far, and it reminds me of mistaking cynicism for maturity. (Although historically, it may come from poor models of disease, where we mistook bacteria and viruses for diseases.)
So, what’s my take? I’ve experienced many spirits who drain energy. Some drain it quite aggressively, resulting in headaches, disorientation, even nausea. These are unpleasant, and are worth learning to protect against, both defensively and offensively.
But remember: Those symptoms are on the order of a hangover. Unpleasant, not life-threatening. Worth avoiding, but not fretting about. Be aware, do magick responsibly (learn protection), and enjoy exploring.
(The worst attack I’ve seen caused nerve pain in a friend’s ear. It came from a (human) mage. Nothing to do with spirits, everything to do with human pettiness. I was glad for the protection experience I had, along with the healing techniques to fix it.)
2) Also what is the disadvantage of using direct magick if there is any??
Originally, Direct Magick was about using connections and energy directly, to do healing techniques without channeling ethereal software. That takes much longer to learn the channeling-based energy healing. It also didn’t include manifesting.
These days, I’ve added ethereal software to help you get started. I hope you’ll outgrow that software eventually. The point is still to do magick directly, using energy and connections yourself. But I wanted to offer a gentler start, which requires channeling.
Also, if you enjoy the theater of ritual, we don’t have any of that. Sorry.
3)Can direct magick help me learn those ancient magick that was not pass down or lost in time??
My question is, why do you want to learn about ancient magick?
I see 3 possible answers. First, love of history. If you’re a historian looking for ancient Egyptian fertility rites, that sounds awesome, but sorry, Direct Magick doesn’t have that.
Second, you might hope to glean some clues from systems of healing developed over hundreds of years. After all, Western medicine has developed drugs by looking at traditional herbal medicine. (I think aspirin came from investigating herbal medicine, and it’s pretty great.) I see some potential here, and Direct Magick has some useful tools for separating the wheat from the chaff in these investigations.
Third, there’s a notion that ancient magick was more powerful, calling down plagues and reviving the dead, creating objects out of thing air, smiting your enemies. Most people who ask for ancient magick are after power.
Here’s the thing: In ancient times, they didn’t distinguish between biofield healing vs (herbal) drugs and placebo, or even slight of hand, and they didn’t understand confirmation bias — heck, much of ancient history was oral traditions, shifting and embellishing with each retelling. So those powerful lost ancient magicks? They were probably illusionists, herbs, and other non-magickal phenomena.
But if you’re after powerful magick, I do have a path for you: Understand the underlying mechanisms behind magick. Harness them to create better techniques that solve new problems. Build magick into a respected science, one with thousands of researchers worldwide, connected to medicine and physics and the rest of human knowledge. That’s the path to more powerful magick.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Protection/Safety, ReadersQuestions, Spirits
Update: A friend pointed out that my answer on ancient magick didn’t really express what I really think, that it was more focused on a rim shot than on conveying information. There’s a better answer up now.
Maybe i’m ‘splitting the metaphor’ a bit too much but i suddenly don’t get why spirits are ‘artificial’ intelligences. In the sense that (from the materialist viewpoint) humans are made up from nerve cells, tissues etc ‘spirits’ are made up from ethereal connections etc. Why aren’t humans ‘artificial intelligences made from nerve cells and tissues’? Or IS that actually what the implications of your model kind of are…
Of course if we don’t assume the materialist model then a lot of these kind of conundrums disappear but that’s another issue :-)
If you’ve covered this before please feel free to just direct me to the post
re ‘ancient magick’ – i’ll put my thoughts on the updated post.
Hi Simon, yes, that’s an excellent way to put it: A human is like an AI implemented with nerves.
Intelligence describes the way a system processes information. If the system can see connections between disparate pieces of information, simulate how other systems behave, and also peer inside itself and be aware of how it’s processing that information, (and a few other things), we call that system “intelligent.” We call this an “algorithm,” which is just a fancy term for “way of processing information.”
You can implement that “intelligence” algorithm with any information-processing objects: Nerves, transistors, or their ethereal equivalents.
If you just want to talk with spirits, none of this matters. Thinking of a spirit as a free-floating intelligence is fine. Let them be black boxes.
But what if you want to create a new ethereal muscle that helps spirits and humans think more quickly? What if you want to heal a spirit whose ethereal muscles have been damaged in a fight? What if a spirit is attacking you, and you want to deactivate its ethereal muscles?
To work with a spirit’s mind, we need to peer inside that black box, see the moving pieces, figure out how to work with them. That’s where a model of “spirit = intelligence implemented in ethereal information processing units” becomes useful.
So, why bring up “spirit = AI” so early, before my readers are working with the ethereal muscles that make up spirits? Because, as a scientist, I like seeing the moving parts. If someone shows me a complex machine, says “there are moving parts in here, but they’re too complex to understand yet,” that sounds like a fascinating puzzle. But if someone shows me a complex machine and says, “this thing has no moving parts, it just inherently does this complex behavior,” that turns me off. It reminds me of phlogiston and elan vital, rather than successful science. And, since my hope is to connect to people who want to apply a scientific mindset to magick, I want everyone to know that you can work with spirits without abandoning the scientific drive to peer inside every black box.