Why I Explore Magick’s Implementation

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

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I’m going to end this series where I should have started it, with a simple question: Why bother exploring magick’s implementation?

Originally, I did it out of curiosity. See, I simply refuse to believe that physics has a special case for human lips saying a certain incantation, or for ink on paper forming a particular rune. The fundamental laws of physics can’t possibly treat one set of air vibrations so differently from all other air vibrations, and they can’t possibly have some connection between these particular air vibrations and distant events in a job search, and those fundamental laws cannot possibly apply only when the person saying those words is initiated into the right social group, and only when wearing a ring made of silver rather than gold, and only when the moon is positioned such that the earth sees only 1/4 of it lit up, and only when …

There’s just no way that set of circumstances exists as a fundamental law of physics, as a special case that the universe singles out and says, “When you get all of this right, then and only then, you can find your lost jewelry.”

These complex behaviors must emerge from some edifice. Something programmed to recognize those inputs as a key of sorts, that when triggered, responds by influencing events. That “something programmed” must operate on some laws that are more fundamental than the particular rituals we use to operate it.

Originally, I explored magick’s implementation because I was curious. I wanted to understand all of that: The fundamental laws governing magick, the “something programmed” that responds to particular rituals, and how it actually influences events. All of it.

In the past few years — ever since getting good healing results, really — I’ve become less focused on curiosity, and more focused on how magick can improve peoples’ lives. To me, that means developing new techniques that produce better results, because magick just isn’t mature enough yet to go mainstream.

(If magick were already widely accepted, some of the results we have today would be quite useful. But to become widely accepted, we need techniques with clearer, more obvious results.)

I don’t think we’ll find those techniques by accident, or by trying things until one works. The problems are just too complex, and the steps required too precise and unintuitive, to think we could stumble upon them.

Solutions like this have to be designed. And you can only design based on what you understand. If you understand the runes and incantations and other traditional aspects of magick, you can design a new request for that “something programmed.” But once you understand the fundamental laws of magick — the laws that the “something programmed” uses to influence events — you can design a fundamentally better way of doing magick.

How? For one, the magick done by that “something programmed” is probably nowhere near the fundamental limits of magick. Now, if we only make requests of that “something,” we’re limited by what it’s programmed to do. No combination of incantations and runes and other traditional methods can cause that “something” to do something it’s not programmed to do. But once we understand the fundamental laws, we can build new techniques on our own, without needing that “something” to already know how to do them.

That’s why I still work on magick’s implementation: Because it lets me peek into the fundamental laws and, eventually, build a better way of doing magick.

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Intent and Implementation: Manifesting

Monday, February 11th, 2013

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Imagine doing magick for wealth, or love, or to find a job. You focus on your intent and send it out. Maybe you imagine your intent as a ball, forming in front of your face, flying off to cause a manager to decide to hire you, or surrounding a ping pong ball with a lottery number written on it, causing it to be selected.

That’s manifesting. (One visualization for it.) And roughly everyone who talks about manifesting talks about, “sending out your intent.” The phrase is so common, so repeated, that it seems almost silly to ask, “What does it mean to send out your intent?”

But, seriously, what does it mean to “send out your intent?” I mean, your intent is nerve signals in your brain, not some external entity you can order around. And if there is some external entity, well, it seems worth exploring how that entity works, and how to use it better, doesn’t it?

And just like that, we’re back into magick’s implementation, asking what actually happens when we “send out our intent.”

If you’ve been with me for a bit, you already know my answer: The mage focuses on their intent, and some ethereal software reads their thoughts and acts on those instructions. But I don’t want to re-hash that model today. Instead, I want to disuss the three parts of manifesting that any model has to explain, in as general a way as possible.

Those three parts are: Sending out your intent, planning events, and acting on that plan.

Sending Out Your Intent

Intent is nerve signals in your brain. That’s not exactly the sort of thing you can send anywhere. Even if you had a super-MRI and could map each nerve’s signal, when we talk about “sending out your intent,” we don’t exactly mean, “Email the MRI recording of your neural activity as you thought about the job you want.”

In other words, we need a bridge between neural activity and magickal messages, which will probably be some form of energy or magickal structure.

I focused on this problem in 2012, working on communication techniques for psychic intuitions. The techniques involve grabbing the energy signatures my brain enters as I think a sentence, packaging those signatures up, and sending them to the ethereal software.

By the way, if you want to focus on one of these steps, I’d focus here. Sending out your intent is the only step the mage needs to be involved in — by default, the ethereal software handles the other two for you.

Planning Events

Say you manifest for a good job. We might metaphorically say that it’s like your intent went out, found a job, and acted like a magnet, drawing you toward it. Except that a job isn’t a physical object you can grab, and magnets don’t affect the decisions of hiring managers.

In other words, “manifesting = magnet” is a great way to explain what manifesting does in layman’s terms, but probably has nothing to do with how it does it.

Whatever drives manifesting, it has to be able to figure out which jobs are good ones for you, and what events and decisions need to happen to result in such a job. Which turns out to be incredibly complex.

One thought on this: Maybe manifesting does not, in fact, plan out a series of events. Maybe it simply influences events, one at a time, based on which seems more likely to produce a favorable outcome. Given a few weeks, it will tend to get lucky. I’m not saying this is how it works, but the idea occured to me as I was writing this post, so I’m sharing it.

Acting on that Plan

Whatever drives the manifesting needs to act on that plan, actually influencing the physical world. And, just like implementing energy healing, you can’t simply send an instruction to a cell, or a lottery ball, or the brain of a hiring manager.

(The hiring manager, of course, understands English. But we’re not sending messages in words, we’re using magick on the manager’s brain. And the nerve cells in their brain don’t understand English any more than the cells of their muscles or skin do.)

Summary & Future Work

Those three steps — sending your intent, planning events, and acting on that plan — are what I think of when I think of manifesting’s implementation. So far, I’ve only really dug into sending your intent. And that’s intentional: I already have ethereal software that handles the rest with a reasonable level of compotence. It only makes sense to implement the part I have to do, before I implement parts that are already handled.

But my experience suggests that anytime there’s a large, unexplored part of magick’s implementation, there are improvements to be made there. And so, in the future, I intend to explore what happens to a manifesting request after my intent goes out.

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Intent and Implementation: Energy Healing

Monday, February 4th, 2013

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Imagine you’re developing a healing technique for someone with a complex condition. Chronic hives, for example. You research the disease, and find out it’s caused by an overactive immune system attacking the person’s own skin. You want their immune system to realize their skin isn’t a threat. That’s your intent.

It’s natural to want to send that intent out, to create some ritual or visualization or something centered around the idea of, “Tell her immune system to stop attacking her skin.” After all, that’s how most people do magick: To find a job, you focus on your intent, maybe do some ritual, and send it out. For a healing session around inflammation, you focus on your intent, visualize a healing light going from your hands to that person, and let the magick work. So, you want to send out the intent to “Tell her immune system to stop.”

Of course, we all know that cells don’t speak English, that you can’t actually tell that to her cells. But… Intent feels like so much more than words, particularly if you’ve done successful magick based on your intent before. So you send it out, and see what happens, hoping the instruction somehow makes its way to her cells, and that her cells listen.

In other words, you’re trying to send information (in the form of an instruction) to her cells.

Here’s the rub: Information isn’t a single thing. Information is a way that some physical object is organized. In your computer, information is electricity and magnetic charges. In your brain, information is neurotransmitters and nerves. Your voice is information, too, but that information exists in vibrations in the air. And in cells, information is stored in hormones and proteins and other biological molecules.

It’s extremely complex to convert information from one medium — electrons, vibrations, proteins — into another medium. To move information from a hard drive to your brain, for example, requires a computer, programmed to read the hard drive, interpret those 0s and 1s as text, and display the text on a screen. Just because you can express the intent in your brain doesn’t mean you can translate that intent into something your white blood cells can understand.

Back to the magick. For energy healing, we need to find energy that changes cellular behavior in the intended way. Which means we need to convert that intent from brain-storage into energy-storage.

Most of the time, we use ethereal software to do that conversion. We ask it to send healing energy, and it figures out what energy signatures will help. That is, the software figures out how to implement your intent. The whole reason that focusing on your intent does anything useful is because the ethereal software picks up the intent and converts it into energy in the right signature (or whatever else is required.)

Except that sometimes, the software doesn’t know how to implement that intent. It doesn’t know the right signatures to use. That’s what happened to me with the hives, and with a few problems since then. There’s a gap between what you want and what your tools know how to do.

How do you bridge that gap? By working out the implementation yourself. By figuring out which energy signatures, delivered to what spot, will cause the desired change at a cellular level. It requires both magick and medicine, a few attempts, a lot of patience, and a fair bit of luck. It’s hard, but it’s the only way I know of to create magick techniques that your ethereal software doesn’t already know — the only way to push through a problem that intent alone can’t solve.

How do you do that? I’d like to tell you it’s about building energy while focusing really hard on your intent, but that’s just not how it works. Your brain wasn’t born knowing the right energy signatures to heal hives, any more than your brain was born knowing how to read the magnetic charges on a hard drive. No, the solution is a lot of hard work, training yourself to recognize different signatures in different tissues. It’ll take me several books to get us there. But it’s worth it.

Why’s it worth it? Because building new techniques — new implementations, not just new ways to send out your intent — is how we can solve new problems, and how we can build a better, more capable, more useful magick. (Then we’ll program those techniques into ethereal software, so everyone else can use them, too.)

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Intent and Implementation

Monday, January 28th, 2013

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I want to convey an idea that’s key to developing a new style of magick, or really, to developing any new technique. But I’m not sure how. So I’m going to write, and hope I figure it out by the end of this post.

The idea is the difference between intent and implementation.

(Previously, I’d talked about “interface vs implementation,” borrowing a phrase from computer programming. But I think “intent” makes more sense here.)

Most magick focuses on intent. You intend to send a person healing energy, imagine them recovering, and channel some sort of energy. You intend to find a job, do some ritual to focus that intent, then send out your intent. You intend to move energy around, so you imagine it moving, and let whatever happens to actually move it just happen unconsciously.

Intent, intent, intent, followed by an image or ritual to convey that intent to your unconscious mind. And it works great, so long as you have a tool to turn that intent into actual change.

But I’m about to step ahead too quickly. So, let me back up, and ask you: What is intent? At the simplest level, intent, like every other tought, is the subjective experience of nerves firing in our brains. Nothing more, nothing less. Nerves releasing chemicals, sending electrical impulses through the world’s most complex information processing device.

Which is amazing. I’m not trying to be reductive, to say that intent is “just” neural impulses. There’s no “just” about it. Neural impulses in a human brain are pretty amazing, and the way they create all of these subjective experiences is pretty amazing, too. My goal is to explain, not explain away.

But here’s the rub: If intent = neural impulses, how does intent affect the outside world? How does that pattern of neural firing cause external change? What does it even mean to “send out your intent”?

And now, you’ve moved from intent to implementation. Simply asking how that happens, simply realizing that the standard explanation doesn’t really explain anything — that “sending out your neural impulses” doesn’t really make sense — has moved you into exploring magick’s implementation.

It’s a tough nut to crack. If you’ve been with me for more than a few weeks, you’ve already run into mental muscles, ethereal software, possibly thought layer and thinking mind, and other components of my model. But my goal right now isn’t to provide an answer, it’s to provide a question: What happens to connect neural firing to change in the world?

This is as much as I can write today, and as much as I think I’d want to read in one chunk if I were you. I made some progress, but still don’t really know how to explain this. Next post, we’ll make it concrete, and talk about intent vs implementation in energy healing. I hope to have a concise answer by the end of the week.

Also, I’m still making progress on the book. The intro is done, I’m starting on Part 1. I’ll post chapters next time I’m consulting and don’t have time for new writing.

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

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