Influencing Emotions with Magick

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

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So far we’ve learned to make quiet connections and used those connections to see the energy signature of friends’ emotions. Both of those were accessible to beginners when I taught the workshop at the Occult Bookstore in Chicago.

Today: Setting your own emotional state. It’s intermediate magick. You have to be able to make energy with a specific signature, which takes some practice. If the other exercises were challenging, treat this as a peek into what’s coming as you improve.

The Effect

Take the energy signature of an emotion you’ve seen. Build that energy in your body. Send it to your head. This will move your emotional state toward that emotion.

If you’re relaxed, it will set you into that emotion. It’s harder if you’re already in a conflicting emotional state. If you’re angry, it will take more energy, with a clearer signature, to shift yourself to being happy. But it just takes practice.

Knowing Your Friends

I like using this to get to know friends better. Everyone has a different experience of each emotion. Your friend’s experience of sad is different than yours*. If you set your head to your friend’s emotional signature, you’ll experience their version of the emotion.

*For example, some people experience sad as numb, others experience it as pain.

Influencing Others

Sending energy with an emotional signature into someone else’s head will influence their emotions. This is best used to improve a conversation that’s already guiding them toward that emotion, rather than to set a new emotional state out of the blue.

You can use this for good. Calm down a friend who’s having a bad day. Excite someone who’s getting depressed.

Sure, influencing people could be used for selfish purposes. But that just means you should be careful what you do. Not that you shouldn’t learn it.

Learning to Use Energy Signatures

If you don’t know how to produce energy in a particular signature, how do you learn it? I don’t know. I learned it years ago, very slowly, with no real plan. Same for most mages I know. So I don’t have a clear answer.

Doing the exercises in the previous posts will help. And I’ll be writing a series about how to start learning direct magick soon.

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Sensing Emotional Energy Signatures

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

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Yesterday was about making quiet connections: Connections without energy flowing through them, so you can see* what you’re connected to more clearly. Today is part 2 of the workshop I taught in Chicago, including the exercise that let all the beginners see they were doing direct magick right.

*Not literally see. But there’s no word for “magickally getting information into your thoughts.”

You’ll need a partner for this exercise. It will help if your partner is also practicing magick, or at least does energy meditations. If they don’t do magick, just say you want to feel the energy signature of various emotions. It’s more approachable that way.

Step 1: Connect

Connect to your partner’s head. If you know them well, placing your palm on their temple is ideal. In the Chicago class, we made contact where the shoulder meets the neck. Maintain contact through the whole exercise, at least the first time.

Make a quiet connection, and relax. Have your partner do an energy meditation, move the energy to their head. Let their energy enter your hand, then move it up your arm into your head. Use the visualizations you normally use to move energy. Do this until it becomes comfortable. We practiced for about 5 minutes with several partners in the workshop.

Step 2: Sense Emotions

This is the exercise that made everyone in my workshop sure they were doing it right.

Have your partner recall a memory that triggers an emotion. A specific time they were cheated, or something recent that made them happy. The goal is to enter that emotional state. A specific memory works better than thinking “I’m happy.”

While they focus on that memory, have them build energy in their head. Bring it up your arm and into your head. Notice how the energy feels in your body, and how you feel absorbing it. Have them tell you the emotion, so you can learn the name for that feeling.

Have them pick a very different emotion, and a memory to go with it. Make the new emotion very different. Go from angry to happy. Don’t go from angry to frustrated, or happy to excited, since those are too similar. Repeat the exercise with this new emotion.

The difference between emotions was so obvious in the workshop that novices who had only done energy meditations became sure they were using connections right. It took about 10 minutes of practice for everyone to become comfortable with this.

Step 3: Test It

Close your eyes (so you don’t just see their facial expression as they remember the event). Have them pick either emotion and build the energy. Tell them what emotion they picked.

Read more on testing.

Intermediate Magick: Setting Your Emotions

You can set your emotional state by building energy with that emotion’s signature. You can also learn more about close friends by using their emotional signature, rather than yours. I’ll cover that in the next part of the series.

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Making a Magickal Connection

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

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This week is about connections. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Connections.

Consciously controlling connections is the best way I know to start with direct magick.

These exercises come from a 90-minute workshop I taught at the Occult Bookstore in Chicago. The workshop was on controlling your emotions by controlling the brain’s energy signature. We’ll cover that tomorrow.

Today is about making a quiet connection: a connection without energy flowing through it. They’re used to sense the energy signature and structure of people, systems, and whatever else you connect to.

Step 1: Build Energy in Your Body

Do an energy meditation. Try mine. Or google for one you like. The details don’t matter.

Step 2: Move Energy Through Touch

Touch your leg, or touch a partner. Visualize the energy moving from your chest or chakras down your arm, into your hand, and into whatever you’re touching. Again, the details don’t matter.

Step 3: Move Your Hand Away, Sustain the Energy

Breaking contact forces you to create a connection to send the energy through. You have to, or you can’t send the energy. Your unconscious knows this. So when your conscious mind says “keep sending the energy,” your unconscious will make a connection.

Move your hand away less than an inch. Just to where there’s no contact. You should still feel the energy flowing through your hand like normal. Practice this until it’s comfortable.

Slowly move your hand further away. At 2-3 inches, the physical connection* will drop, and the energy flow will stop. That’s OK. It’s supposed to happen.

*A physical connection is a connection to physical objects. It goes through physical space, so distance matters.

Try again. Focus on forcing the energy through your hand into your target. Imagine a path between them. The flowing energy will help sustain the connection. Practice this until you can comfortably sustain the connection and keep the energy flowing.

You should notice a change in the connection when your hand moves about 3 inches away, where the connection changes from a physical connection to a magickal connection*. Recognizing this change will help you later.

*When talking about types of connections, a magickal connection is a connection to magickal structures. Here, those magickal structures are the physical connections that go to your hand and to the target. Magickal connections are stable over long distances.

Step 4: Quiet Your Connection

When you force energy through a connection, you only feel your own energy and the target’s resistance to it. But there’s a lot more to see*, and seeing it will help you learn direct magick. The key is quieting your connection, so it’s stable but isn’t carrying energy.

*I don’t see magick. Not visually. Information moreso flows directly into my thoughts. The closest sense is feel. But I say “see” out of habit.

Quieting your energy is easy. Just visualize the energy not flowing down your arm anymore. Keep it in your chest.

Maintaining the connection is hard. The trick is to keep your awareness in the connection while the energy stops. Just focus your mind on the connection. Visualize the connection staying up while the energy flowing along it stops.

This was the hardest exercise for beginners in the Chicago workshop. They weren’t sure they were maintaining the connection, and couldn’t quite tell the difference between the connection and the energy flowing along it. If that’s where you are, don’t worry. Just work the exercises.

Tomorrow I’ll give you the exercise that let everyone in the workshop see they were doing direct magick right. But you need practice with connections before you can do it.

For now, go by feel. When I make a connection and move my hand away, I feel a tingling on both my hand and my leg (or wherever I touched to make the connection). It’s a mental pressure, not a push like a rubber band, but a strong desire to bring my hand to my leg. It’s similar to the feeling of someone staring at you*. Not the creepiness, but the tingle.

*I use that feeling to describe connections because, when you look at someone and focus on them, you unconsciously connect to them. The feeling of someone looking at you actually is a connection.

Making a Quiet Connection

Once you get the feel of quieting a connection that’s already established, try making a quiet connection. Use whatever visualization you use for staying aware of a connection. Start with touch, then move your hand away, sustaining the connection as you go.

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Connections: The Basis of Magick

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

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Magick is fundamentally about connections. They let magickal structures influence physical objects. They carry energy to heal a person. Connections make magick work.

Direct magick begins with the conscious control of connections. It never really stops being about connections.  Improving my connections improves everything else I do.  It’s become one of my focuses when practicing magick technique.

Signature

Connections have several signatures.

The surface signature comes from the connection’s moment-to-moment activity. Carrying a particular energy, powering a particular structure, etc.

The underlying signature determines the type of connection. Connections to physical objects have a different underlying signature than connections to magickal structures like systems. A connection that ties a magickal system to a physical object will shift its underlying signature.

The fundamental signature is the building blocks that make up both the underlying signature and the surface signature. Fundamental signatures are unique, like fingerprints. Once you’ve worked with someone, you can recognize their magick by the fundamental signature.

Better connections have:

  • A surface signature more closely matched to the signatures the connection will carry
  • A smoother transition from one underlying signature to another
  • A better match of the target’s fundamental signature, and a smoother transition from your fundamental signature to theirs

Connections as Rope*

Connections come in different scales.

Not different sizes. Different scales.

People come in different sizes. Some people are big, some are small, but they’re all people.

Rope comes in different scales. Heavy rope is made by braiding normal rope, which is made by binding twine, which is made by twisting thread…

Wire has different scales too. Co-axial cable is made of insulated wires, which are made by twisting bare wires together…

Large magickal connections are made of smaller connections, which are made of smaller connections, which are made of…

I used co-ax cable for visualizations.  It carries current, like connections carry energy. Unlike real co-ax, I visualized every wire as made of multiple insulated wires, all the way down.

*Yes, I plagarized myself.  This comes from advanced direct magick: fighting.

Distance

Connections to physical objects go through physical space. They can be interrupted, and are hard to maintain over long distances.

Connections to magickal structures go through a different space. Physical distance doesn’t really matter.

To connect to a physical object over great distances, use a connection to the object’s energy layer (a magickal structure), then shift the connection’s underlying signature as you go from the energy layer to the physical object.

A connection to a physical object is called a “physical connection.”  A connection to a magickal structure is called a “magickal connection.”  Sometimes I use “magickal” to make it clear I’m talking about magick, rather than threads or rivets.  If I say “a magickal connection to a physical object”, I mean a physical connection.

Quiet Connections

At first, you will make connections by sending energy to a target. Your first goal will be to make a connection reliable enough that people notice it.

As you improve, you will aim to make your connections less noticeable. Quieter. More precise.

Quieter connections more closely match the signatures of whatever you’re connecting to.

Quieter connections let smaller-scale threads move freely, so each thread can adjust to the target’s signature independently.

Quieter connections don’t carry energy.  By not forcing energy along the connection, it won’t alter the target as you look around.

Exercises

The posts this week will have exercises to learn to use connections better. See all posts tagged Connections.

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