Magick of Thought

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Before the healing session, my girlfriend’s itching lasted an hour or more. Now, it’s down to 5 minutes or less.

My girlfriend developed chronic itching and hives earlier this year. We’re not sure the cause — it could be a latex allergy (she recently finished nursing school), or a response to hair dye, or something pet-related — but it’s been going on for months. Her dermatologist recommended steroid cream, which worked for a while, but she’s developing a tolerance to the cream, and it no longer controls her outbreaks. So it’s time for to see what my healing techniques can do.

We had found that, when I applied my healing techniques, her itching came down for several hours, but that I would have to re-apply the healing energy several times a day, which is impractical, especially since I travel for work. And Lisa is experienced with channeling psychic forces*, but not with physical healing, so she can’t easily learn the technique I’d use.

*Note to long-time readers: “Force” is my temporary term for “system” as I consider a proper re-naming.

Here’s where the first bit of direct magick comes in: The forces that provide psychic information work in basically the same way as the forces that provide healing energy. If you can instruct one, you can instruct the other, particularly if both forces were made by the same group of spirits.

A couple of years ago, I’d gotten her a better psychic force to channel. So I go back to the same group of spirits, explain the problem, and ask them to recommend a force to channel for healing. They do, and tell me the command to use:

Connect it to the nerves experiencing the itching or pain, and ask it to “Heal the itching.” (Alternately, you can ask it to “Numb the itching.”)

I can see why they set up the force’s command this way: This is the most general way to set up the command language. It has a general command to heal (or numb), and a general input of “This tissue that I’m connecting you to,” which gives the user a lot of flexibility with a small language.

But there’s a problem: Lisa doesn’t know how to make a connection to her nerves. Because, you see, connecting to your nerves isn’t the same as imagining your nerves, or imagining a wire going to your nerves. It requires you to first awaken the mental muscles for working with physical cells, then practice recognizing different types of cells until you can find your way around your body, and only then can you make a connection to your nerves. Imagining it, without first developing the skills required for the technique, doesn’t work.

Here’s where the second bit of direct magick comes in: These forces are programmable. Like making a shortcut* in a computer, you can create a simpler, more specific command. So that’s what I did: I connected to the force, connected it to Lisa’s nerves, told it to what energy to apply, then told it that, when she says “Numb my itching” and gives it her signature, it should execute the same command I just gave it.

*For the computer-savvy: It’s actually more like writing a shell script.

Why not just make a servitor to do the healing automatically? Short answer is, because I don’t work with servitors. Long answer is, because (1) I’m less confident the servitor would work (since I don’t know the exact steps it uses to perform a healing), and (2) if the servitor did work, it would wind up invoking a force like I just set up, and I’d rather know exactly which force I’m using so I can debug the commands.

That debugging turned out to be really important. When I first tried this technique, I didn’t specify the right set of nerves*, and Lisa only got minor relief, and only in specific areas she focused on. So I went back to the spirit that recommended the system. He helped me debug the technique, specifying additional sets of nerves, and specifying “her whole body.” After that, when she gave the command, her itching dropped down from a 8/10 to a 4/10 in under a minute, which is a pretty significant result. (She’s a nurse, so she uses the nursing 10-point pain scale).

*I’d initially targeted only the nerves touching her skin. You also need to get the nerves that those nerves signal — the nerves one step closer to the spine.

If I hadn’t been able to step through the technique consciously and discuss it with an expert, we would have been stuck with the less effective healing energy, instead of the more effective version. I see things like this all the time, where the most intuitive technique isn’t particularly effective, and a few tweaks produce a much better result, which is why I place so much emphasis on debugging.

Since setting this up on Saturday, Dec 10, Lisa has been applying healing energy to herself a few times an hour, whenever she triggers a new itch. (Lots of things trigger itching: Changing clothes, bumping into something, etc). The results are pretty consistent: The itch is noticeably reduced within 1 minute, and stops within 5. Without the healing energy, each itch lasted for an hour or more.

Can you set up a command like that? Probably not yet. You’d need to have forces that allow this type of re-programming, and you’d need the ability to command forces with words. (That post is coming soon). But I thought this would be a good example of what direct magick lets you do.