Archive for the ‘Advanced Conscious Magick’ Category

Energy Everyone Can Feel: New Insights

Sunday, September 10th, 2017

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For several years, I’ve been exploring how to create sensations with energy. I want an energy technique that creates sensations in most people, so reasonable skeptics can feel energy for themselves, become curious, then explore energy themselves. I also want energy that’s easier for beginners to feel, so they can feel when they’ve done an exercise or technique correctly, and have more confidence it’s not just their imagination.

At last week’s Energy Geek, I got a new insight that’s giving me promising results.

Here’s the summary: There seem to be two sets of energy signatures that flow out of nerves. One of them seems to be better for most healing techniques, while the other seems to be better for creating sensations. As I’ve explored energy healing, my energy has moved in the direction of the signature for healing techniques, and (without my realizing it) away from the signature for creating sensations. That’s (part of) why I’ve had difficulties with sensations and erotic energy, and also points the way toward reliable, effective techniques in those domains.

(The rest of this post covers my current work. It’s somewhat technical and written for experienced practitioners, or at least those familiar with my work.)

A little background:

When I connect to muscle, tendon, or most tissue, I see only one pathway from the cells to the energy layer. Much of my work involves going further down this pathway, closer to cells, which tends to produce larger, faster results from energy healing.

When I connect to nerves, I see two sets of pathways. One of them seems to correspond to cell state (inflammation, hormones, other things that affect the nerve cells over hours and days). I use those pathways in most healing techniques, such as when someone has nerve inflammation due to a bulged disk or auto-immune disorder.

The other set of pathways seems to correspond to neural activity, the second-by-second changing state of nerves. I use these pathways for communicating my thoughts with spirits and ethereal software.

When I’m connecting to a person’s body, including my own, I’m usually focused on the signatures for cell state, not neural activity. And over time, it’s become my default to only look at the signatures for cell state, and ignore the ones for neural activity, whether I’m sensing or building energy. It wasn’t a conscious choice, just the natural result of focusing on one side all the time.

At last week’s Energy Geek, I partnered with an experienced practitioner who is especially good at creating energy that people can feel. She’s one of the people I recommend for beginners who are having difficulty feeling energy. I used my new techniques to sense energy in my body more precisely, and watched her energy. And it turns out, her energy focuses on the signatures for neural activity, and largely ignores the signatures for cell state.

I explored this more at home. Building energy in my body that matched only the signatures for cell state, I got the same result as before: Mild tingling and pressure, but mostly felt as an awareness of energy in my mind, not a physical sensation in my body. Kind of like imagining a feather brushing against my arm: I feel something, but it’s different than feeling an actual feather.

Then I built energy that matched the signatures for neural activity. I wasn’t sure what part of them to match exactly, so I just aimed to excite the whole set of signatures. And within seconds, I had a shaking, shuddering sensation, like an energy orgasm but lacking most of the pleasure. It was pronounced and obvious. I felt it bodily, not mentally. As a first version of energy that creates sensations, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for.

I tried a combination of the two energies, activating pathways for both cell state and neural activity. I expected it to create even more sensation, but surprisingly I felt it less than when I only activated the signatures for neural activity. It was far more pleasant, though. Perhaps the energy is more dilute, doing less to the pathways for neural activity? Or perhaps activating the pathways for cell state somehow causes the nerves to accept more energy in general, reducing the impact of the signatures for neural activity. More exploration is needed. But being able to make a pleasant version is important, so this result is promising as well.

These findings also solve a mystery: In my early 20s, erotic energy came easily to me, and partners would experience energy orgasms. As I’ve gotten better with energy, I’ve had less and less success with erotic energy, except for a few sessions in recent years as I’ve consciously explored it. But why? So many energy techniques were a struggle in my 20s, but come to me easily today. I’m far better with energy now than in my 20s. Why has erotic energy gone backward?

Here’s why: As I’ve increased skill, I’ve learned to align my energy more precisely with whatever I’m working with. But for close to two decades, I’ve primarily worked with the signatures for cell state (used for energy healing). And the more I align my energy with cell state, the less my energy interacts with other signatures — that’s the whole point of aligning energy. Which means that, as I’ve been improving my energy skills, I’ve also been (unintentionally) decreasing how strongly my energy creates sensations, including erotic ones.

And now that I understand all that, I can begin engineering techniques that are even more effective than what I did in my 20s, along with (non-erotic) energy that’s especially easy for beginners and laypeople to feel.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

How I Create New Energy Techniques

Saturday, August 5th, 2017

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I often talk about engineering energy techniques. But what does that mean? How is that different than practicing, or creating new visualizations? Today I want to share some of my recent work on becoming more aware of exactly which signatures of energy are in my body, and where.

At last month’s Energy Geek, I met a person who was more in tune with the energy in their body than I was. And I got competitive. I gave myself 4 weeks to catch up.

Here’s what happened: We were playing a new game with two senders and one receiver. One sender (randomly selected) would send, and the receiver would identify the energy and say who was sending. I demoed the game with two volunteers, M and T. First I got a feel for each of their energies: M’s felt like pressure on my back and T’s like a gentler pressure in my forehead. Then we did it for real, with me facing away so I didn’t know who was sending. I narrated what I felt, “A stronger pressure in my forehead, so that must be T.” I turned around, and M had been sending. Then she explained that she had changed her energy to match T’s energy, just to see what would happen.

Later in the class, when M was receiving, one of her senders tried to do the same thing, matching the other sender’s energy. But M wasn’t fooled. She explained how, yes, the superficial layers of the sender’s signature had changed, but that the deeper layers of the signature stay the same. Which is exactly how I explain signature scale.

And I realized: When I’m making connections outside myself, to a healing client or a spirit or anything else, I have a fine awareness of the deeper layers of signature. But I haven’t developed that same awareness for energy inside my body.

I set about developing that awareness. One approach would have been to meditate on my energy, feeling it, practicing until I could discern the deeper layers of the signature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But because I’ve already done the work to become consciously aware of my ethereal muscles (the parts of my mind that drive energy), I can take a more conscious, faster path.

My plan: To sense energy outside myself, I create a network of sensory connections. Let’s make one of those networks inside my body, in all the different energy structures and pathways I use in my practice. And let’s make that network stable, so it’s just always there, and I don’t have to create it again every time, and so it’s worthwhile to make it really good.

To create that network of sensory connections, I engaged three ethereal muscles: One that actually creates sensory connections, and two that work with energy in my body. In the past, I would have had to guide the actual creation of that network, feeling each location I wanted a sensory connection and guiding it to be placed. But after two decades of that, my ethereal muscles just know how to do it, and I was able to tell the connection-creating muscle, “Make a network of sensory connections in every structure handled by these other two muscles.”

(I also specified that the network should sense a broad range of signatures, not just my own.)

It took several hours to set up the network, then I let it rest overnight to become more stable. The next day, I started looking around the energy in my body, using another ethereal muscle designed for communicating this sort of information to my mind. And I ran into my first problem: In becoming aware of all the different structures and layers of my energy field, I was trying to sense far too many different things at once, and my ethereal muscles couldn’t process all that data.

Again, I had a few options: Practice, and let my ethereal muscles slowly learn the task. (Reasonable, but slow.) Simplify the network of sensory connections, getting less detail, though still probably more detail than someone who hasn’t consciously created a sensory network. (A reasonable backup.) Instead of either of those, I decided to upgrade my ethereal muscles, working with the spirits who upgraded my ethereal muscles earlier this year.

I asked about upgrades to view large amounts of data, and they came through. It took two days to install and power all the new modules, another day of slowly using the ethereal muscles before I was able to even start viewing a single layer of my energy body. Then for the next week or so, I would pick one layer of my energy body per day, practice looking around it, and feel my ethereal muscles stretch as they worked to interpret all the signatures I was sensing. Each day, this started out exhausting, and by the end of each day, my ethereal muscles had come to recognize the signatures in that layer of my energy body and could display it to me, not easily, but without too much difficulty.

I ran into another bump after writing this: Each ethereal muscle has a set of connections to my brain’s energy layer that it uses to communicate with me. The ethereal muscle that synthesizes all that data and displays it to my mind, which I call my “view muscle,” had too much data to send to my brain, and too few connections to send it along. It took two days to fix this, first learning how to find the correct areas in my brain’s energy layer to connect it to, then creating the new connections and ensuring they’re all powered properly.

Looking back on all this, what stands out to me is how each step of this process — creating the sensory network, upgrading the ethereal muscle for viewing the data, and adding bandwidth for it to send that information to my brain — each of those steps took me months or years to learn. And each of those techniques, in turn, were based on other techniques I’d developed earlier. That’s the essence of engineering: Building a technique, then using it as a step in building a larger, more complex technique. It makes my work today hard to explain, and I’ve been thinking about how to teach all of the techniques that go into work like this.

What do you think? Do you want more posts like this, on the techniques I’m developing today? Do you want more posts with practical advice and exercises for people new to my work? Something else? Let me know in the comments.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Advanced Energy Basics (Part 2)

Tuesday, June 27th, 2017

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“That’s the first time I’ve really felt energy,” my friend told me after helping me test my updated energy techniques techniques. She’s taken energy classes for years, but never felt much. Practicing with me this week, she felt something clear, obvious, and discernible.

This month I’m exploring advanced techniques to build, move, and project energy — techniques that are more effective than the basics we all learn when starting with energy. My goal is to produce obvious, reliable results that aren’t based on the receiver knowing what to expect.

Last week I discussed new techniques for storing and building energy. This week is about moving and projecting energy.

This is the second half of a 2-part post. Start with part 1 here.

Step 3: Moving and Projecting Energy

I slowly built and moved energy, watching the ethereal structures that shepherded it through my body. I expected the energy to move through the same structures I use for energy healing. Instead, I found another set of ethereal structures that push the energy around my body by squeezing it, similar to how the throat and other tubes in the body move food and fluids with rhythmic squeezes.

At this point I want to orient you to the ethereal structures I’m working with:

  • Structures that store energy produced by cells. This seems to be the default place where energy workers store energy. It has a limited capacity, which may be why we’re taught to channel energy instead of using our own.
  • Last week, I told you about new, upgraded energy storage structures. These upgraded storage structures are located inside the default energy storage structures, and release energy into the default storage structures. If I just say “energy storage structures,” I’m talking about the upgraded ones.
  • From the default storage structures, the energy flows into the ethereal structures I use for energy healing. Based on testing in myself and friends, the deeper (closer to cells) the energy is in these healing structures, the stronger the sensations.
  • As those healing structures fill with energy, excess energy flows into the structures that squeeze and move energy. This post is about those energy squeezing / moving structures.

I also watched as I projected energy out of my left hand and into my right. Before the energy flowed I was (automatically, unconsciously) creating a pathway for it to flow on, like a broad, sturdy connection.

I called the spirits who had made the ethereal muscle I was using and asked them to upgrade the pathway (making it thicker and more stable) and the energy squeezing structures (making each one smaller, so they’re less prone to missing energy).

Often, upgrading the ethereal muscle makes a huge difference, but this time it didn’t. I’m not sure those upgrades were even necessary. This time, the biggest improvement came from learning how those structures work (for building, moving, and projecting energy), and finding improvements in how I was using them. Then, like a person slowly learning the proper finger placement for typing or playing the guitar, I would consciously, slowly step through that better procedure, until it became automatic and unconscious. (I’m still practicing all this, but it’s becoming easier.)

The rest of this post is about what I’ve learned about how these structures work and how to use them.

For moving energy around my body, I’ve found that it’s best to focus on where the energy currently is, and on the energy squeezing structures there. At first, I would try to engage them as firmly as possible, squeezing all the energy to the new location. Then I let my ethereal muscle do it automatically, and watched that default behavior: It makes many little squeezes, moving a little energy at a time, over and over, in a ripple. This ripple works better than my single large squeeze.

But that doesn’t mean we’re done. Just because my first idea wasn’t right, doesn’t mean I give up. After seeing this ripple, I used that as my starting point in developing a better version. And I found that, instead of a ripple of extremely weak squeezes, I can make a ripple of medium-strength squeezes that moves a lot more energy. That’s the technique I used when my friend felt energy for the first time.

I had a similar experience with projecting the energy through the air. I was practicing on myself, sending energy from my left hand to my right through 2-3 feet of air. I moved energy to my left hand, thought about projecting it into my other hand, and I felt a little something in the right hand. But it was so faint — it reminded me of what I’d feel when working with energy 10 or 20 years ago, much weaker than the energy I’m using today. What was going wrong?

Then I realized: I was creating the pathway to send energy along, but I wasn’t actually sending the energy. I had to engage the energy squeezing structures in my left hand and push the energy onto the pathway. Once I did that, I felt the energy strong and clear in my right hand. A small change, a single step fixed, and suddenly it works — this is a common experience for me with debugging energy techniques.

One more interesting experience with all this: I start each practice session by engaging all these structures for building and moving energy. And even before I build energy, even before I move anything, I feel a sensation in my body, and it feels very similar to how energy felt in my body 10-20 years ago. And I wonder: Back then, was I feeling actual energy, or was I just feeling those energy-handling structures? Might my students be feeling their ethereal structures engaging, rather than feeling actual energy? Understanding this may help me teach energy more effectively, particularly when I’m troubleshooting for students.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

How I’m Creating Advanced Versions of Basic Energy Techniques

Monday, June 19th, 2017

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I’m exploring techniques to build, move, and project energy that other practitioners can feel.

“Hold on,” you say. “Aren’t those the basics of energy work? Don’t you already know all that?”

I do. But I want a better version: More reliable, less tiring, capable of creating exactly the energy signature I need (so I can explore different signatures and find the most useful ones). I want to understand exactly how each step works, then I want to improve them. So I’m using all the advanced tools I have to redesign this basic technique.

Step 1: New Ethereal Muscles

The spirits I work with rarely work with humans. And, like all spirits, they don’t have bodies. The result is, they didn’t have an ethereal muscle designed for using to energy in one’s body. (This may be why I haven’t gone very far with embodied energy until now.)

My first step was to get a dedicated ethereal muscle. But that’s not something I can do myself — ethereal muscles are complicated, and intending to make one doesn’t help. This was almost entirely on the spirits I work with, and my main contribution was asking the right questions and finding spirits who found this project interesting. They took it from there, talking with other spirits who do work with humans, getting a bunch of ethereal muscles for working with energy in the body, then synthesizing the insights from all those ethereal muscles into one new muscle for me. That’s what I’m working with today.

(I also did some work with powering the new ethereal muscle and connecting it to my brain. Some details here and here.)

Step 2: Enhanced Energy Storage

Here’s how most of those ethereal muscles work: They store energy created by the cells of one’s body, then release that stored energy when it’s needed. It’s a good solution, but it only provides a limited amount and intensity of energy. As I practiced with this energy, I’d get exhausted quickly, and need to wait until the next day for these reserves to recharge. (This may be why practitioners are so often warned to not use their own energy for healing techniques.)

I wanted more power. And I already have a power source, provided by the spirits I work with, that powers my ethereal muscles and some energy structures in my body. Could we use that?

We started with a simple solution: Create structures to store this power from the power source. Release it when I want to use energy, and convert* that power to energy. I used this for a couple of months, and it was good enough.

*What does it mean to convert power to energy? Recall that energy has a signature, and the signature has different scales. If we think of an energy signature as a painting, then you can zoom in on one color of paint, and zoom in more to the molecules that make up that paint color, and zoom in more to the atoms that make up those molecules. Power is what happens when you keep zooming in. It’s like energy without the signature. To convert power to energy means to give that power a signature. I’ve discussed this some here.

But even with a power source, if I used this energy for a half-hour or more, I’d still run out and have to wait for the power to recharge. I wrote in my notes, “Something must be wrong. People build and use energy all the time, and they would have a fraction of the power reserves I have now. I must be wasting the stored power somehow.”

I stepped through the technique, watched each step, and found the problem: I was releasing the stored power into my body, then converting it to energy. But there was a lag, and most of the power was dissipating into my body, unused, with no signature to cause any sensations or other results. I needed a way to capture all the power and give it a signature before releasing it.

Talking with my spirits again, we wound up with a two-chamber structure to store the power. The first chamber is the same as before, it stores power. Then when I want to turn that power into energy energy, the first chamber releases a small amount of power into the second chamber, where it’s contained, turned into energy, then released into my body. After designing this solution, they updated my ethereal muscle to know how to create and use these two-chamber structures, and my ethereal muscle set it all up more-or-less automatically while I rested. Since then, I haven’t come close to running out of power, and I have much better control of how much energy I create and how quickly I release it into my body.

One thing to watch out for: Last weekend, I built energy like this, didn’t use all of it, and got distracted. A few hours later, I was feeling pretty lousy. The energy in that second chamber had gone bad — I think the signature had degraded, leaving me with energy in a signature that wasn’t healthy for my body. After I flushed out those energy storage structures, I felt much better. It’s a similar concept to grounding, but a different spot to do it.

Note: Flushing those structures is important, even if you don’t bother with grounding. For years, I’ve built energy that matches my body’s signature well enough that there’s no need to release / eliminate / ground the energy. But even still, unused energy that’s stored, not in the body, can degrade and cause problems.

This seems like a good length for a post. Next week, I’ll talk about upgrades to moving and projecting energy, how I overloaded my ethereal muscle and how I fixed it.

Update: Part 2 is here.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Enhanced Cognition via Advanced Energy Techniques

Sunday, April 9th, 2017

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Ten years ago, I began creating energy structures in my mind to enhance how I think. Last year, I developed a new, better version of the technique. Last week, I returned to that work.

When I engage these energy structures, my mind becomes faster and more focused. I can hold more ideas and threads in my thoughts at once. Insights come more easily and carry me farther. And I become more aware of my will and feelings, and more able to articulate my thoughts.

This all started around a decade ago, working with my mind’s semi-conscious areas. The term is my own, but the concept is common in personal growth classes: We have these thoughts just below the surface, tugging at our attention without quite being acknowledged. Often, they arose in childhood, and don’t work in the adult world, and we’re encouraged to acknowledge that part of ourselves, listen to it, and help it adjust to the adult world. I liked the idea, and set out to create an energy technique to help that adjustment happen faster.

My idea was to create an energy pathway between my conscious adult mind and the part of my mind responsible for those semi-conscious patterns. I found the semi-conscious area by focusing on those thoughts and feeling which part of my mind engaged, then I found an inactive energy pathway and energized it. With that pathway in place, it became easier to engage the semi-conscious pattern, to listen to it and explain the adult world to it, to update it to be an ally rather than a hindrance. I even found that I didn’t have to be fully conscious of that updating, that (after creating the energy pathway) those semi-conscious patterns would update all on their own. I called the technique consciousness integration, and used it for several years.

(If I were reading this post, I’d be wondering how much of that was placebo. The simple answer is, I have no way of knowing. But I found many benefits, and always felt my efforts were worthwhile.)

Last year, I developed a second version of consciousness integration. I’d been connecting my ethereal muscles to my mind, helping them read my intent and send me information more precisely. I did this by creating networks of connections to allow my ethereal muscles to read and write energy signatures to specific points in my mind. And I thought about my consciousness integration work, creating those pathways from semi-conscious areas to my conscious mind. What if I created some of these networks throughout those semi-conscious areas? Then instead of connecting a single semi-conscious reaction to my conscious mind, I could just connect them all at once, updating them all together instead of one at a time.

It took around a week to complete those networks. I happened to be talking with a spirit when I first activated them, and the energy they provided felt like a wind howling in my mind. It was amazing but useless — I became alert but unfocused, thinking quickly but without direction. The reason was simple: I had about 10x the power I needed. But after I turned the power down, and then down some more, it became wonderful, and I found I could focus more easily, think more clearly, and engage my ethereal muscles more smoothly. Since then, it’s become a staple of my practice, something I use so often that I forget it’s an addition to my mind.

In the past few months, I’ve been connecting some new ethereal muscles to my mind, and gotten better at making those networks. So now I’m returning to consciousness integration, doing the same technique on even more of my mind. So far I’m excited about the results: My mind is becoming even faster and more focused, and I notice improvements in my ability to explain ideas, verbally and in writing. I can also hold more ideas and threads in my thoughts at once when I engage the consciousness integration energy networks, and insights come more easily and carry me farther. I’m about halfway done creating the networks for this round, and I’m eager to see what happens when they’re complete.

A couple of notes:

I’ve used the term mind loosely in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about my brain’s interface layer. This is an energetic structure that sits on top of my brain’s energy layers, serving as an interface for communication with my ethereal muscles, ethereal software, and spirits. When I connect my ethereal muscles to my mind, I’m specifically connecting them to this interface layer, and when I create new pathways in my mind, they’re specifically in this interface layer. When I talk with spirits, they refer to this interface layer as thinking mind, and I’ve used that term in some past writing.

Second, this really is advanced work. It requires many other techniques to do properly. Please don’t try this at home unless you have experience working specifically with your mind’s interface layer and can convert my hand-waving explanations into concrete techniques you know and understand. I started working with my mind very slowly, making tiny changes, and so should you. If you do try any of this, it’s at your own risk.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Spirit vs Self: How I Check if a Message Came from a Spirit

Monday, March 27th, 2017

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“When talking with spirits, how do you know if the message is from the spirit, or if it’s your own thoughts?” A friend asked me recently.

It’s a sensible question. Spirits don’t appear in front of me or speak audible words. Instead, I think a message, send it to the spirit, then quiet my thoughts and let the spirit’s reply drop into my mind. This is the experience of other practitioners I talk with, and it’s also how we receive psychic intuitions and other information.

I have a couple answers. The first is my day-to-day techniques for telling if a particular message came from the spirit or from my own mind. The second involves my other experiences with spirits, and why I believe in spirits at all.

Recognizing Spirit vs Self

In most sessions, I use two techniques to tell a spirit’s message from my own thoughts. These aren’t intended to prove that the message came from a spirit, and they’re not what convinces me spirits are real, but they’re fast easy techniques to help me check for errors.

The first one happens passively and constantly: A spirit’s message has a different voice in my thoughts. Try this: Recall something someone said to you recently, and picture them saying it. Notice how the memory retains some of their voice? That’s what it’s like: Remembering something said by someone else. The particular voice seems to be related to the spirit’s energy signature, and each spirit I work with has a slightly different voice.

The second one is something I do actively: I’ll try to shift what I’m thinking. If the message is, “Practice communication twice a day,” I’ll try to instead think the message, “Practice running three times a day.” If the words are all my own thoughts, they shift easily. But if they’re a message from a spirit, they have a certain firmness to them, and it takes extra effort to shift my mind away from the message. It’s subtle — I definitely can think anything I want, even while talking with a spirit — but it serves me well, flagging for me things that I heard because I expected to hear them, not because the spirit actually said them.

If I find that I’m not accurately hearing the spirit, I’ll repeat back to them what I heard, and ask them if it’s correct.

Again, I use those techniques to quickly check my communication for errors. But why do I believe in spirits in the first place?

Why I Believe in Spirits

I’ve collaborated with spirits to develop energy healing techniques, and seen people recover quickly afterward.

I’ve trained with spirits, learned techniques for making connections, sensing energy, awakening ethereal muscles, and more. Techniques that weren’t obvious to me, that I probably wouldn’t have come up with on my own, that worked well.

When spirits have trained me in some techniques, I’ve connected to them, felt the energy structures that make up their minds and bodies. When I’ve taught techniques to spirits, I’ve connected to their minds, watched them awaken ethereal muscles, guided them to do it in better ways. On occasion, I’ve even repaired a spirit’s ethereal muscles that were damaged by their errors or by a malicious spirit.

And as I’ve gotten to know a few spirits better, they’ve connected to my mind and body, shared energy for calming, or focus, or pleasure.

The most common, most obvious way to interact with spirits is by talking with them. That’s certainly what I do most of the time. But there’s so much more to do. And those other experiences are the ones that give me confidence that spirits are real and not just in my head.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

What I’m Learning from Creating Sensations with Energy

Monday, March 13th, 2017

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I’m developing energy techniques to create obvious sensations, both to demonstrate that energy is real (to clients, to skeptics, to myself), and as a measurable task to focus on as I develop my skills. This post is about that testing and what I learned last week as I tested variations of the technique.

I’m using the same exercise as at the Energy Geek Meetup last month: Blindfold your partner (or just have them face away from you), send energy to either their head or their hips, verify that they feel the energy where you were sending it. I lay out the details here.

For years, I’ve known I should test my techniques, make sure each is working so I can confidently build on it. But I’ve felt such resistance, such fear of failing, that I’ve rarely done good testing. But actually testing and improving my techniques feels amazing. (Most of this post is technical, not narrative, so the excitement probably doesn’t show all the time. But I’m quite excited.)

In this most recent testing last week, I varied two aspects of the technique: Where in my aura I built the energy, and how open my shields were. My notes are below.

Aura: Use Deeper Layers

The energy around the body isn’t one uniform thing. It has layers. You can think of them as going out from the body, though to really grasp these layers you need to think in 4 dimensions.

A great deal of my work in the past decade has focused on accessing deeper layers of the aura (or biofield). It seems that changes to the deeper layers are more powerful: When I do a healing session, the deeper I go in their energy field, the faster and more pronounced the results are. So these deeper layers are a prime candidate to test when developing any energy technique.

I tested building energy in two layers: One superficial, which is the default layer that engages when I think about building energy; and one deep, the layer I normally focus on in healing sessions, that requires extra effort to engage.

I tested the superficial energy first. Didn’t work. We tried it 2 times, the receiver got both wrong. I hadn’t expected the superficial energy to work, so I took that as confirmation and moved on. (I’m assuming the sensations were placebo.)

Then I tested deeper energy 8 times. The receiver got 6 correct, 1 incorrect, and 1 where she didn’t feel anything. She also felt the sensations much quicker, and somewhat more strongly, than with the superficial energy’s placebo sensations. Good results.

A little statistics: Let’s discard the time when the receiver didn’t feel anything, and just focus on correct vs incorrect. She was correct 6/7 times. Since each guess is 50/50, you’d expect her to get about half correct by random chance. To get 6 out of 7 correct is about a 10% chance (math below). That’s good enough for a psychology paper, and it’s good enough for me too (for now).

Math: Here’s how I ballpark the stats in my head: If she went 6/6, that would be a 1 in 64 chance (2^6 = 64). But she went 6/7. There are 7 possible ways to get 6/7 correct (any one of the trials could be incorrect), so doing that is a 7 in 64 chance, or about 10%. (If anyone has better math, please leave a comment.)

So that’s my first result: Superficial energy is relatively ineffective at producing sensations. Deeper energy is much more effective. (I’m meeting with another friend next week to replicate these results.)

Shielding: Fully Open

Shielding blocks energy. I normally have shielding up, so I don’t pick up energy from the people near me.

It turns out, shielding also blocks the energy I build in my body. That was the finding from the last Energy Geek Meetup, when I forgot to open my shielding and couldn’t get the demo to work.

For the testing above, I fully opened my shields, so my energy could flow out. But I had an idea: What if I shield my body, but open my shielding around my hand? Could that help my receiver be even more accurate, since they would only receive energy from my hand, and not get any ambient energy from the rest of my body?

To test it, I closed my shield, then connected to my right arm and focused on opening my shielding there. This was my first time doing this, shielding only part of my body, so it’s possible I made a mistake here, but my body’s shielding still felt closed even as my arm felt open.

Then I built energy throughout my body (using the deeper layer energy) and sent it to my hand. It felt odd, like my energy had to find new paths from my abdomen to my hand, like the paths it normally took were blocked. What gives? Shielding goes around my body, not inside it, so it shouldn’t block my own energy within my body.

I’m not sure what was happening. Maybe the energy takes a straight-line path through the air to my hand? Maybe it flows over the surface of my body, rather than inside it? I have more exploration to do, but this showed me there’s something I don’t understand about how energy flows from one part of the body to another.

We did 2 tests like this, with my shield only open near my right hand. She got both wrong. I took that to mean that partially opening shields doesn’t work. (Maybe I can solve this once I understand what happened, but it’s low priority.)

So that’s the second result: It seems to be necessary to fully open my shielding in order to send energy effectively.

Finding My Calling

Talking about this work feels different. Better. More concrete than other work I’ve done. I had expected it to be hard, but actually it was easy. The exercises in this post took about 15 minutes to do.

Now that I’m started testing techniques, I’m excited to test (and improve) sensory connections, communication with spirits, and all the other work I do.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Energy, Mind, and Identity

Sunday, February 12th, 2017

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Ethereal muscles are the parts of the mind that drive energy. For the past few months, I’ve been adding to my ethereal muscles, creating new modules and entire new muscles to enhance what I can do with energy. Last week, I shared how I started this work and some of my early results. Today, I’m discussing the new muscles I’ve created in the past couple months, and how this experience has shifted my thinking about energy and ethereal muscles.

(This post builds on the last one. If you haven’t read it, I recommend reading it first.)

This post is a bit disjoint. Think of it as notes on something I’m still figuring out.

Five New Ethereal Muscles

For as long as I’ve known how to identify them, I’ve had 4 ethereal muscles: Access, Effects, Communication, and Mental Activation.

In the past few months, I’ve added 5 more:

View: Presents information to my conscious awareness. Previously, each ethereal muscle presented information through its own connection to my brain. That still happens, but when there’s a large amount of information to present, particularly an image or diagram, my ethereal muscles use the View muscle to present it. (The images and diagrams don’t appear before my eyes. It’s closer to remembering an image I saw yesterday.)

Shielding: Creates structures that block connections and energy, a task previously handled by Access muscle. I used it to update all my shielding. Much more effective, both at creating a dense shielding, and at opening that shielding when I want to allow someone in.

Connection to Distant Spirits: Some spirits seem to be very far away. Not like Australia is far away, but rather a different underlying energy. This is sometimes called another plane or dimension, though I’m not wild about either term. I don’t expect to use this much, but the spirit who installed these muscles recommended it so I got it.

Smaller Signatures for Effects: Effects muscle handles adjusting energy signatures, like for energy healing. This Smaller Signatures muscle helps my Effects muscle use and remember very small-scale signatures. I haven’t used it for much yet, but probably useful as I move forward with energy healing.

Ongoing Communication: For psychic intuitions (and some other uses), you want ethereal software to always be in communication with you, even when you’re not paying attention. You don’t want it to turn off when you sleep, because you’ll need to turn it back on when you awaken. This muscle handles that always-on communication, keeping the ethereal software’s connection open and active. (Some ethereal software seems to support this for some users, but having this muscle makes it easy to do this with any ethereal software.)

Those are my five new ethereal muscles. Like my old muscles, each performs a specific task with energy. Already, things that were challenging (like ongoing communication) are becoming easy, which is so exciting.

The Origins of Ethereal Muscles

Where do ethereal muscles come from? It’s always been speculation for me. Did my brain create them? Did spirits? Some other process? I’ve had suspicions, but very little information, because I didn’t know how to observe ethereal muscles back when they were created.

This time, I know where they came from. These muscles came from the spirits I work with. Those spirits have some ethereal software that creates ethereal muscles. If I wanted to, I could receive training in using that ethereal software, and use it to create additional ethereal muscles for myself.

This confirms a suspicion I’ve had: That my original four ethereal muscles came from the spirits I worked with. When I say “worked with,” I don’t just mean any group of spirits I contacted, I mean groups that were closely connected to me, that had lasting connections to my mind. That seems especially likely now.

I suspect that, over my career joining different groups of spirits (with increasing levels of skill), I got upgrades to my ethereal muscles without actually being told about it. I probably didn’t have full ethereal muscles at age 11 (when I started using energy) or age 20 (when I was using ethereal software, sensory connections, and talking with spirits). Back then, I probably had modules (or small muscles? It’s unclear to me the proper terminology). As I learned to awaken my ethereal muscles, the spirits training me probably created more modules for me to work with, until finally I had four full ethereal muscles.

I’d long suspected that. Now I’m fairly certain that’s the case.

This opens up new questions:

Do different people have different ethereal muscles, depending on which spirits they work with? Would spirits who mainly offer psychic intuitions only give the person a muscle for communication, not other tasks? (I suspect yes.)

Does everyone get the same initial set of ethereal muscles, then receive upgrades depending on what they explore? (I’m unsure.)

Are people born with some ethereal muscles? Or with some facility to use energy that’s not dependent on ethereal muscles? (I suspect the latter.)

What’s the best set of ethereal muscles for a person to use? I suspect mine were not the best ones to learn with. In particular, my Effects muscle seems to be designed for a spirit — it has a lot of functionality for connecting to someone else and modifying their energy, but it has relatively little functionality for using my own energy in my own body. I expect an ethereal muscle that focuses on energy in one’s body might be better for most people, and I’m currently exploring options there.

And this also opens up a bigger question:

Are Ethereal Muscles Part of Me?

Ethereal muscles are, well, ethereal, made of energy rather than atoms or cells. But I’ve always thought of them as part of me, in the same way that my arm is, or perhaps closer to the way that my memories and thoughts are part of me.

Until recently, my perception has been that my ethereal muscles had always been there, so it was easy to think of them as part of me. But now that I’ve added these new ones, now that I know we can add and change them without adding or changing me — what are ethereal muscles now? They’re part of my mind, enhancing what I can do with energy, but they’re not exactly me. They’re very personal possessions, more part of me than my car or computer, but not part of me in the same way that my arm is. A grey area, between me and not-me.

The best analogy may be cybernetic implants from sci-fi stories: Computer components that plug into the brain, enhancing a person’s memory or reasoning or other cognitive functions. Part of the mind, and more a part of the person than, say, their clothes or cell phone. But also something that can be replaced, upgraded, or removed, leaving the person still themselves. A grey area between possession and personal identity.

These are the half-finished thoughts I’ve been exploring lately, as I upgrade the parts of my mind that drive energy.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

How I’m Awakening My Mind to Energy (Even More)

Monday, February 6th, 2017

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Ethereal muscles are the parts of the mind that drive energy. They handle things like making connections, building and moving energy, and receiving psychic intuitions. Each one is special-purpose, handling one of those tasks, similar to how each area of the brain handles some specific task. And for decades, I’ve thought of ethereal muscles as something you’re born with, that can be awakened and strengthened but not created. That is, until last month, when I went from four ethereal muscles to nine.

For as long as I’ve known how to identify them, I’ve had 4 ethereal muscles:

  • Access, which handles making and blocking connections. As this muscle gets stronger, I can make smaller, more precise sensory connections.
  • Effects, which handles recognizing and changing energy signatures. It’s used for healing techniques, and it helps with any task requiring me to create ethereal structures.
  • Communication, which handles psychic intuitions, and other cases of communicating with spirits and ethereal software.
  • Mental Activation, which handles awakening and powering my ethereal muscles.

(Each muscle is made of many modules. For example, within Communication, there’s a module for reading the energy signatures of my brain as I think a message, another module for packaging up those signatures so I can send them, and another for keeping track of who I can send messages to.)

Modules and muscles awaken naturally as we practice. If you’ve ever experienced that feeling of stretching your mind, of extreme fatigue after learning a new technique, you’ve felt your ethereal muscles awakening. And you know how slow that it, how learning a new technique can take months of practice before your mind seems comfortable with it.

I reasoned that, if I could skip this slow process of awakening my ethereal muscles, I could learn new techniques more quickly. So I developed techniques for awakening them: Flooding new modules with energy until they turned on, and later, techniques focusing on the power that keeps all my ethereal muscles fed, and opening up that power to new ethereal muscles. It accelerated my learning, and became the second foundational skill of my system. (Sensory connections was the first foundational skill.)

Most of my 20s were spent awakening my four muscles. Well, awakening the modules, really — it took years before I could even sense an entire ethereal muscle at once. So I’d find a module, fill it with energy, connect it to an ongoing source of power, and connect it to its neighboring modules. And for around eight years, I developed techniques to awaken larger and larger groups of modules. It was a cycle: I’d use those techniques to awaken more ethereal muscles, which improved my skills and made it possible to develop the next, even better technique.

Sometime around 2010, I’d awakened all of my ethereal muscles, and began learning to use them: How to shift an energy signature smoothly and precisely, and what signatures to shift for energy healing. Which parts of my mind to engage while communicating with spirits and ethereal software, and what software to use for psychic intuitions. Networking with spirits, and finding more skilled ones who could answer my questions and help me develop new techniques. But it’s always been using those same four ethereal muscles.

Late last year, as part of my work on creating a type of energy that produces sensations in everyone (not only energy workers), I wanted to watch the energy of individual nerves as a person, say, was touched, or moved their arm. This lead me to explore even smaller, more precise sensory connections. And despite practicing for a couple weeks, making those smaller connections never got smooth or easy. Why?

I asked the spirits I train with. We realized that my Access muscle was already maxed out, that it was already making the smallest, best connections it could. But rather than being a problem, this opened a door: I was introduced to other spirits (in the same group) who specialize in creating ethereal muscles. They gave me some additional modules for Access, used by spirits in that group to make more precise connections. And it worked: That technique I had struggled with for weeks became easy and natural.

But more than solving that one problem, this experience shifted my thinking: Ethereal muscles aren’t set at birth. New modules can be created. And it turns out, many additional modules, and even entire new muscles, are already available if only I know to ask for them.

Could this be a return to the fast learning of my 20s, when new techniques came easily each time I awakened a new piece of my ethereal muscles? Today, two months later, it seems like that might be the case. I’m excited, if a bit daunted by all the new ethereal muscles I can use now, and all the techniques I can (ought to?) learn.

Next week, I’ll share more about the last two months, the new ethereal muscles I’ve installed, and how this is shifting my thinking about ethereal muscles, using energy, and how to teach these skills.

Edit: Here’s the follow-up post.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

How I Engineer New Techniques: Erotic Energy

Sunday, May 22nd, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Instead of visualizing my intent or performing a ritual, I engineer techniques. This is one of the core practices of Direct Magick and Direct Biofield Healing, and one of the keys to solving new problems with those systems. But what does it mean to “engineer” a technique?

Today, I want to share a concrete example of engineering a technique.

In March, I had an unexpected success with erotic energy, and found a new ethereal muscle responsible for it. The muscle was engaging automatically, which sounds good but is actually a problem: It would engage when I was turned on in the right way, visualizing the right thing, breathing just so… It was great when it happened, but it wasn’t reliable. I wanted to solve that, and also learn to harness this type of energy to create other sensations for healing techniques and demonstrations.

I connected that new muscle to my other ethereal muscles, and updated its connections to my brain, so I could engage it consciously, at will. There’s a whole other set of techniques I developed in my 20s for doing that, it could be its own series, but today we’re going to focus on what happened after I made that new muscle conscious: It would still create the right type of energy, but instead of creating it throughout my body, it only created it in a small region of my chest.

Why my chest? Really, it would create that energy in whatever parts of my body I connected to. But connecting to a part of the body isn’t as simple as thinking about it. When I connect to my knee, for example, I create a bunch of sensory connections to the tendons, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and other tissues in my knee, and to all of the different ethereal structures that carry energy from my cells to my aura*. If I connect to a part of my body in that way, the new muscle will build energy there. And by default, if it don’t connect anywhere, it works on a small region of my chest.

*I used to call this my “energy layer.” The term “aura” is imprecise, but I’m using it to reduce the amount of jargon and make this easier to connect to.

In March, I couldn’t connect to my whole body like that. I couldn’t even connect to all those ethereal structures in my knee, not all at the same time. It felt deeply intimidating, and I distracted myself for two weeks.

In April, consulting in Singapore, I started practicing these connections. I started with one ethereal structure — that means a single step along the path from my aura to my cells. I connected to that structure in my chest, then found the same structure (the same step in the path from aura to cells) in a nearby part of my chest, then a bit farther over, until it was in my shoulder, arms, and hands, and up to my head, and down to my stomach and legs. I wasn’t thinking about the parts of my body, but instead connecting to the ethereal structures, finding similar structures adjacent to them, and only then putting a little energy in those structures and noticing where in my body I felt the energy.

When I couldn’t find any new parts of that structure, I knew I was at a boundary — my fingertips, the top of my head, etc. I don’t think I reached any of those boundaries the first day. My mind and ethereal muscles were exhausted after connecting to a few regions of my chest and arms, but that was ok. The point wasn’t to solve the entire problem in a day. The point was to develop a procedure: Connect to one structure at one point, find similar structures nearby, repeat until you get to a boundary. That was something repetitive, an algorithm, which I could practice until it was unconscious. I found that solution, practiced until I was exhausted, then rested, then did it again the next day. Slowly, my ethereal muscles learned to do those steps without being consciously guided.

I did that every morning on the train to work. The third day, I connected to my entire body (for that single structure). The fourth through sixth days I repeated the task, taking smaller steps when I found nearby areas, getting a higher-resolution image of my body. The following week I added other structures, going up to my aura, or down toward cells, just like I do for healing techniques. (“Up” and “down” are metaphors, I discuss what they mean here.)

By the end of the month, I could connect throughout my body to the four main ethereal structures I use. It took about a minute, and no longer exhausted me. At that point, “connect to my whole body” became a single action, a basic technique I could use in building other, more complex techniques, such as “connect to my entire body, build this type of erotic energy, then share it in this way.”

That’s what engineering a technique looks like: Taking something I cannot do, creating a series of simple steps to achieve it, then practicing those steps until they become natural and automatic.

I realized two things in writing this post:

First, did you notice steps like, “connect to the same structure in an adjacent area,” that sound conceptually simple but aren’t precisely defined? That’s because finding an adjacent structure to see where it goes isĀ itself a technique. Several techniques, actually — an initial version, then an improved version, then improved again. Developing each version was similar to what I laid out in this post: A series of simple steps I trained my ethereal muscles to do. In most posts, I gloss over techniques like this, but today I wanted to call it out.

Second: The process of developing Direct Magick was the process of training my ethereal muscles to do new techniques, practicing them until they’re automatic and unconscious, then using those techniques as the building blocks for the next technique. Month after month, each technique building on the ones that came before. I’ve been working with energy and magick for 25 years, and engineering techniques for around 15 of those years. At one per month, that’s roughly 200 techniques. That’s what’s involved in teaching this system. Sometimes it feels overwhelming to teach Direct Magick, but seeing the actual scope, this feels doable.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.