You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Step 3: Mastering Magick
The way most mages practice magick prevents them from ever mastering it.
Step 3 is about fixing that.
What Most Mages Do Wrong
Mages rely on external structures to do magick for them. Call it “The Universe,” “The Tree of Life,” “Angels*,” etc. The external structure reads your intent and drives the magick for you.
You’ll never master magick by letting something you don’t understand do the hard parts for you.
I call these external structures “systems“. The name matters. A system begs to be understood, while The Universe begs to be incomprehensible.
*Sometimes Angels are spirits, sometimes systems.
Mastery Requires Understanding
A competent user understands a tool’s interface. A master understands how the tool works.
Normal drivers understand the pedals and steering wheel. Race car drivers understand gear ratios and tire treads so they can shift at the right time in any weather.
Using Google lets you navigate the web. But you have to understand the technology the web runs on — HTML, DNS, SQL, etc. — to be a hacker.
If you only study the visuals and ritual correspondences of a system, you’re only aspiring to be an ordinary user.
Mastering Your Tools
Next time you do magick, use sensory connections to watch what the system does.
What does it connect to? For energy healing, not just the person as a whole, but what part of them? How does it find that?
What energy signatures does it use? How much of each? Is it forcing that energy into them, or just letting them absorb what they want?
Watch how your system does magick. Then figure out why it works that way.
Start Simply
Start with something simple your system does.
Most of what energy healing systems (like for Reiki) do is simple. Selecting the right energy signature is sometimes complex.
When a spirit connects to your brain to read your thoughts, the way they remove thoughts from your brain is simple. Reading your thoughts into their mind is complex.
Predicting and altering the future (psychic and manifesting) is complex. But the way those systems communicate is the same as the spirit’s communication above.
Not sure what part of your practice to start with? Leave a comment, I’ll see what I can do.
Pushing Your Limits: Doing Magick Without Help
The understanding you get from doing a skill far outstrips the understanding you get from watching it.
To truly master magick, drive it yourself, instead of sending your intent to a system.
If you’ve never tried, the parts of your mind that drive magick will be inactive. Inert. Asleep. The first step to doing magick yourself is to activate those mental areas, either through focused practice or by using energy to wake them up. Click here for the series explaining how.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.The 2nd Step (of 3) to Learning Conscious Control of Magick
Monday, June 21st, 2010You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Image by Alex Gray
Step 1 was about controlling each step of magick consciously.
Step 2 is about seeing what you’re doing. Not just visualizing magick, but seeing it directly, with sensory connections.
Seeing magick directly lets you grasp how it works, instead of relying on imperfect analogies like visualizations and ritual correspondences.
This more accurate understanding of magick lets you:
- Create more effective visualizations by more accurately representing each action your unconscious mind needs to perform.
- See what happens in each step of your effect so you can correct those steps one at a time.
- Create your own magick effects.
Magick Without Sensory Connections
Novice mages treat visualizations like they’re actually happening.
An energy healer might visualize light entering your body and clustering around injuries. He might explain that “The light represents energy entering your body and collects at the injured tissue.”
Notice what that explanation lacked:
- How do you target the injured tissue?
- How do you determine the best energy signature to use for healing? Different injuries require different signatures.
- How do you stabilize the energy so it stays at the injuries?
And the big question: How does energy cause cellular change?
Directly observing magick lets you answer those questions.
Using Sensory Connections
Use sensory connections to watch the energy healer connect to an external magickal structure (called a system) that helps turn his intent into action. Pay attention to the energy it uses, how it delivers that energy to each point in the body, and how each magickal structure in the body responds.
Eventually, you’ll be able to see which steps work well and which need improvement.
What’s Special About Sensory Connections?
You unconsciously made connections when you transferred energy to a friend during the energy meditation exercises. But those aren’t sensory connections.
Sensory connections need to see all the signatures in a large area of whatever you’re looking so you can watch each piece interact with the others.
Your energy has your signature, not the target’s signature. Loading a connection with your energy prevents you from accurately seeing any other signatures. Sensory connections should be quiet (not energized).
Even if you stop sending energy, a basic connection only targets a single point. It can’t show you a large area. A sensory connection needs to split when it reaches the target, making lots of small connections throughout the area you’re interested in.
Making sensory connections takes practice. Your connection in Step 1 wasn’t supposed to be a sensory connection. That’s what Step 2 is for.
How To Learn Sensory Connections
- Practice making connections by sending energy through your hand to a friend (as in the previous post).
- Sustain the connection while you remove your hand and reduce the energy (discussed here).
- Make your connection quiet. Don’t simply not force energy into the connection. Make the connection itself less energetic.
- Broaden the signature of your connections, so you see all the signatures of the area you’re viewing.
- Split your connection to cover the entire area you’re viewing.
I’ll write detailed instructions for items 3-5 soon.
Step 1 (of 3) to Learning Conscious Magick: Step-By-Step Visualizations
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
In this post
- Why visualizing each step lets you learn more magick faster
- How to control magick better using your own visualizations
- Examples to help you get started
Intro
To master magick, you need to experiment with techniques you read about or dream up. That means controlling how you do each step of the technique, so you can compare small changes, and keeping track of the results of each attempt.
If you visualize a broad goal — seeing an injury healing or a white shell shielding you — you’re leaving all the details of the technique to your unconscious. You can’t direct your mind to do new techniques in a particular way, and you can’t be sure exactly what you did. Broad visualizations prevent proper experimentation.
Instead, put your conscious mind in control of your magick by visualizing each step. Then you can modify a technique slightly, see how the result changes, and refine your skills through real-world feedback.
Once you learn to consciously control each step, you can learn your style of magick better and develop your own techniques within that style.
This post will show you how make step-by-step visualizations to control each step as you do magick.
Before Creating Your Own Visualizations
Before you start, learn to make your mind respond to new visualizations on the first try. The trick is to get your mind in the state to do magick before you begin your visualization, so it listens to each instruction you give.
Here are two posts on this:
- For magick novices, start by engaging your mind with a simple energy visualization.
- For everyone, learn to consciously get your mind into the state for controlling magick.
As you use your own visuals, make sure to hold your brain in the state for doing magick, so it’s ready to listen to your visuals.
Step 1: Break The Effect Into Steps
Whether you’re refining a broad visualization or developing a new technique, start by breaking the goal into steps.
For example, if your goal is shielding, the steps might be closing your connections, shifting your energy signature back to normal, and maintaining that normal energy signature.
For energy healing, the steps might be finding the injured tissue, figuring out the energy signature you want to use, and injecting that energy into the tissue.
You won’t get every step right the first time. That’s OK. The point is to take a guess at how it might work, try it, and develop your understanding of how magick works so you can refine your technique next time.
Step 2: Develop Visuals For Each Step
For each of those steps, develop a visualization so you can tell your unconscious to do each step in sequence.
Start with the noun you control. Usually that’s a connection, like in closing your connections, using a connection to find injured tissue, etc. It will be something that is part of you.
Then visualize the verb: closing, searching, shifting, etc.
Then the noun it acts on (the direct object). That’s the injured tissue in “find injured tissue” and the normal energy signature in “shift your signature back to the normal energy signature.”
It doesn’t matter exactly what you visualize, as long as it speaks to you. Simple, concrete visuals usually work well for me.
Step 3: Test It
Hold your brain in the posture for doing magick, focus on the visualization you just made, and see what happens.
If all you want is to learn your style of magick (Reiki, Golden Dawn, etc) more quickly, that’s all you need. Ask your teacher for the right steps and visualize each one.
If you want to explore magick further, learn to make sensory connections so you can watch each step in real time and see what works and what doesn’t. That’s the next step in learning to control magick consciously (next post in the series).
If the effect didn’t work, there are 2 things to try:
- Break any steps that didn’t work down into substeps, develop visuals for each substep, and test a few variations.
- Return to step 1 and change the order of your steps, or add new ones and remove ones you had. Experiment with different techniques.
Don’t worry if new techniques don’t work the first time. Magick is complex. It’s not supposed to work right the first time. Just build your experience and your intuition and the successes will come.
Example: Step-By-Step Energy Healing
Let’s develop a step-by-step visualization for building energy in your body and sending it to a friend.
Steps of The Effect
- Build energy in your body
- Expand the pool of energy through more of your body, so you have excess
- Open the energy channels running down your arm (and place your hand on your friend)
- Send energy down your arm into your friend
- Stop the energy flow, close the energy channels
- Release the excess energy into the area around you
Visualizing Each Step
These are just examples. Feel free to use them if they speak to you, or to create your own.
Build energy in your body: Visualize an incandescent white mist entering your chest. The incandescence speaks to me as energy, and white suggests purity and completeness.
Expand the energy: Same visualization, more of your body.
Open the energy channels in your arm: Visualize tubes, like veins, running through your arm. Right now, they’re tiny, and pinched in a few spots. Visualize them opening and releasing the pinches.
Send energy down your arm: Move the white incandescence through those channels.
Stop the energy flow: Visualize the white incandescence stopping, so the tubes no longer glow, then close the tubes (return them to being closed and pinched).
Release excess energy: Reverse the build the energy visual. Make the white mist leaving your body.
Another Example, and How To Protect Yourself
Click here for a step-by-step shielding visualization*. Beyond being a good example, it’s also something you should learn as you begin to practice magick.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.*Note: The shielding post was inspired by Kol’s question below.
The 3 Steps to Controlling Magick Consciously
Saturday, June 5th, 2010You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
In this series:
- How to control magick consciously with step-by-step visualizations
- How to see your magick work, in real time, with sensory connections
- How to activate dormant parts of your mind to increase your magick abilities
This series walks you through a self-training program to learn to control magick consciously. Each post links to more in-depth guides for that step.
Once you complete the program, you’ll be able to learn any style of magick quickly and develop your own magick techniques.
Note: This guide is old. For a more thorough step-by-step guide, see The Step-By-Step Guide to Learning Direct Magick. It uses some posts in this series, plus a lot of others.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.
