How To Learn To Activate Your Mind

Monday, June 14th, 2010

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Brain, computer art

Image via Wikipedia

How To Learn To Activate Your Mind

As you learn magick, your mind activates new areas to handle each skill. I use magick to accelerate that process.

All the tools you need are in this series. But you still need a plan of study. To help with that, here’s how I learned mental activation, step by step:

  • How long I practiced each skill
  • What problems made me learn core and brain activation
  • How I use mental activation to improve my skills today

Summary of Mental Activation

(No new info here. Feel free to skip it.)

Your mental areas are non-physical, magickal structures. They drive magick once they’re active. But most are inactive, limiting the magick you can learn.

Learning a new skill has two phases:

  1. Activate the mental areas responsible for that skill
  2. Learn the skill

Practice will activate the mental areas. Slowly.

Here’s how I learned to use magick to activate my mental areas so I can skip straight to learning the skill.

Stage 1: Finding Mental Areas

A friend was studying how his mind drove magick. He introduced me to the concept of mental areas.

I found them with the exercise I gave you: Make a connection, use a second connection to trace the first into your mind.

I explored my mind for a few weeks. First I watched my mind as I did magick, and worked on recognizing where one mental area ends and another begins. Then I mapped out those area, and saw that some had many active paths inside them while others had only a few.

I hadn’t realized that each mental area was responsible for a specific magickal skill, and the less active ones were responsible for skills I was just starting to learn. But I figured the more active ones were more useful, and that I should try to activate the others.

The time looking around also activated the mental areas I’d need to perform that activation. Not that I was aware of it at the time. But if you’re trying to repeat what I did, spend some time exploring your mind.

Stage 2: Activating Semi-Active Areas

I started with the mental areas that were already partially active. They were all I could think to do. I hadn’t even seen inactive mental areas yet.

I pushed energy through the mental areas. Energy with my normal signature. It worked, but felt clumsy.

The mental areas had their own signature. It was close to my normal signature, but not quite aligned. Once I started using energy with the mental area’s signature, instead of my normal signature, the activation became much smoother. (I’ll do a series on aligning to energy signatures at some point.)

Stage 3: Power Problems

For a few weeks, mental activation worked great. Then power became a problem. I got headaches, slept constantly and never felt rested, and couldn’t activate any more areas.

Looking back, I know what happened. Each mental area used a different power signature. Activating areas changed the power they collectively drew. But I hadn’t changed the power coming to them through core. I was starving my mind for particular power signatures, and it stole that power from my brain.

But I hadn’t figured that out yet. I just knew my mental areas were using the wrong signature. I assumed the right signature, my signature, was the signature I used when making my normal, default energy.

My first thought was to re-balance the mental areas. Shift their signature back to normal by activating the right additional areas, or by changing the signature of some of the areas I was already using. Neither worked.

I started thinking about how power flowed into my mind. Maybe I could leave the mental areas alone, and align the power to them. Would that change my basic signature? I didn’t know*. And as I was looking at my mind and thinking about this, I found my core.

*If you activate a lot of mental areas, it does. But I wasn’t activating enough mental areas at the time to make a noticeable change.

I couldn’t have found core when I first started looking around mental areas. But after looking around for a few weeks, and activating areas for a few weeks, I had grown experienced enough with mental areas to find the power coming into them.

The problems stopped once I activated a core path for each new area.

Stage 4: Brain Activation

Activating mental areas and their cores worked well for several years. Then I started slowing down again as my brain caught up to all the mental areas I’d activated. Read about how I fixed that.

Stage 5: Learn Useful Skills

Learning useful skills quickly is the whole point, right?

I would pick a skill I wanted to learn. Energy healing. Communicating with spirits. Making and noticing subtle connections. Whatever.

I’d practice that skill until the mental areas responsible for it started to come on, then I’d activate them.

When you’re doing this, don’t wait until you know brain activation. Don’t even wait until you know core activation. Just start learning skills. You already know how to solve the power and brain activation problems when they come up.

Every few months, I return* to the mental areas that handle mental activation, activate them better, then ask them what other areas they wanted to work with, and activate those, too.

*In the present tense. I still do this.

Each mental area is designed to perform one magick skill. Activating more areas will make difficult skills easy, and will make you notice the new aspects of magick those areas are responsible for.

Some of the more useful skills in the mental activation cluster of skills:
Finding mental areas for particular skills, so you don’t have to practice until the area starts to activate on its own
Tracing core paths more easily, to find the power supply faster
Seeing more completely inactive mental areas, so I can learn skills that I know even less about

After improving the areas for mental activation, I improve the mental areas for every other skill I use, too. The technique is the same.

The practice from activating all those other areas makes me better at mental activation. So I return to the areas for mental activation and improve how they’re activated. Then repeat the cycle.

That’s how I learn magick.

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How To Activate Your Brain’s Energy Layer (Advanced Direct Magick)

Monday, June 7th, 2010

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This is a transaxial slice of the brain of a 5...

Image via Wikipedia

Activating Your Brain’s Energy Layer

The intent of this technique is to learn new skills faster. I haven’t done placebo-controlled testing, but it’s been useful to me, and I hope it will be useful to you.

Each of your mental areas performs a unique magickal function, handling a specific type of connection or energy or other task.

Depending on how a mental area represents magickal connections and structures, it might need to access the spatial, tactile or visual parts of your brain. And depending on the kind of work it does, it might need logical thinking, lots of extra data, or quick, reflexive responses. Also, each mental area has a different energy signature it likes to use.

You could tie all your mental areas to one brain area. But that will slow your learning.

Far better to activate the corresponding brain area each time you activate a mental area.

This post explains how.

What’s a Brain Area?

A brain area is what it sounds like: A part of your brain.

The nerves comprising a brain area may be spread out in your brain. They work closely together when you think, but they may not be physically adjacent.

Your mental area knows which brain area it wants to work with. Just ask. Connect to the mental area and focus on “What part of the brain do you want to connect to?”

The whole brain area will have one energy signature. Its neighboring brain areas will have different energy signatures. Find the edges of the brain area by looking for these signature shifts.

That’s all you need to navigate your brain’s energy. No neurology required.

Setup: Working With Your Brain

If you haven’t worked with your brain before, this exercise (from this post) will activate the mental areas you’ll need to find your brain’s energy areas:

Before you can make any changes, you’ll need to practice looking around. This will activate the mental area that lets you view your brain, the first area of the mental application for working with your brain.

To find your brain’s energy, place your hand on your forehead or temple and connect to your head. Pause to notice the signature of the tissue you’re connected to (probably your skin and skull). Move in a bit, pausing periodically. When you reach your brain, the signature will change dramatically. You’ll know when you’ve found it.

Don’t try to change anything yet. Just practice looking around your brain.

Finding the Brain’s Energy Area

Each mental area knows the area of the brain it wants to work with. You just need to ask it.

Connect to the mental area you’re activating and try whatever you find the most effective method for communicating your intent to your unconscious. For example:

  • Think “Show me the brain area you want to work with”
  • Visualize the mental area connecting to your brain
  • Focus on your desire to connect the mental area to your brain
  • Adopt a belief that your mental area will tell you where it wants to connect

How Brain Energy Activation Works

Temporarily activate the brain’s energy by pushing energy into it, just like you would make parts of your body tingle by moving energy during an energy meditation.

Here’s where it gets technical, where an understanding of how magick works changes what you do. If you just want the answer, skip to the next section.

We want to change nerves from their passive state to their active state. Each state has a particular signature. Changing the signature from “passive” to “active” should activate the nerves. That’s the theory, at least.

Ideally, the energy would only change the parts of the signature that need to change. The parts that determine the state of the nerves, not the parts that make nerves different from muscles, or your nerves different from my nerves.

Making an energy that precise is difficult. It requires training in physical effects, which I didn’t have when I started this work, and which you may not have, either.

So, your energy won’t be exactly what your brain needs. That’s OK. Here’s how you handle it.

Activating the Brain’s Energy

Push your energy into the brain area gently. The brain’s energy is much more delicate than a muscle’s energy, so use about 10% of the force you normally would. Slowly increase the energy to about 20% of a normal energy healing. If you get a headache, stop sending energy. It should subside in a few seconds.

Don’t use an external system’s energy (like Reiki energy). Its signature will be too different from your brain’s.

Knowing when to stop: Energy-induced brain activation (what we’re doing) feels the same as the mental fatigue you get every time you vigorously practice something new. When you get that, stop.

Immediately connect your mental area to your new brain area. Use the same sort of visual or focus you used to find the brain area. The mental area will guide the state of the brain area and maintain its activation after your energy dissipates. This guidance is more effective before your energy has dissipated and before the changes to your brain start to set in.

That’s it. The brain’s energy is now active. Rest a bit then start using it.

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What To Do When Mental Activation Stops Working

Friday, June 4th, 2010

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What To Do When Mental Activation Stops Working

Mental activation worked great for me.  Until it didn’t.

In 2006, I’d activated and powered mental areas to learn basic mental communication and energy healing.  It wasn’t just faster than I’d learned other skills, it was easier and more fun.  Instead of practicing for hours, I would activate a few mental areas and let the new skills sneak into my mind as I rested.

Then the easy progress stopped.  The mental areas still activated, but they never became easy to use.  Useful magick skills require you to coordinate multiple mental areas, and I simply couldn’t anymore.

Here’s how I fixed it.

The Problem

Mental areas connect to your brain to read commands and exchange information.

When you activate mental areas by practicing a new skill, that practice also activates more of your brain.

But when I activated mental areas directly, it bypassed that practice.  My mental areas had grown 5-10x in the past few months, but the part of my brain devoted to magick had continued to grow at its normal rate.  It was simply overloaded.

I’d like to say this understanding grew from a clever investigation of how my brain and mind were interacting.  But it was more a triumph of perseverance than insight.  I tried every reasonable guess I could: increasing core power, changing the signature of mental areas, reactivating mental areas, etc.  Eventually I got lucky with brain activation.

That’s the way magick exploration goes, though.  Every success is born of many failures.

The Solution

I activated more of my brain by flushing energy through it.  I’ll explain the technique* next post.

Within a month, I was learning quickly again.  Since then, every time I activate a new mental area, I activate a brain area to go with it.  Mental activation continues to work well.

*Actually, an improved version of that technique.

A Favor

I’m trying to make this blog useful for readers like you.  Do you want more personal stories like this one along with the how-to posts I usually write?  Leave me a comment and let me know.  Thanks!

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

Powering New Mental Areas (Advanced Direct Magick)

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

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Mental areas need power to perform magick.

Yesterday was about activating a new mental area.  Today is about powering them so they stay active and work smoothly.

Why Hook Up Power

New mental areas will grab power on their own.  Within a few hours, new paths will open up to feed them.

But during that time, the new mental areas will draw power from wherever they can.  Other mental areas.  Your brain.  Wherever.

The energy drain is exhausting.  Work is impossible.  I slept several hours extra each day until I learned to activate the power paths.  My girlfriend had the same experience.

Where Magickal Power Comes From

Your core paths connect the source of your magickal power (soul, Higher Self, source, whatever term you want) to your mental areas.  If your soul is your magickal heart, your core paths are the arteries, delivering lifeblood to your mental muscles.

Core paths aren’t passive.  They change the power’s signature as it approaches your mental areas.  Active core paths drive that work by absorbing a small percent of the power they’re channeling.  But unused, un-powered core paths shut down.

Inactive mental areas don’t use their core paths.  You’ll need to activate core, too.

Finding Core Paths

When I first found my core, I was looking at a mental area I’d just activated, seeing it trying to draw power, and thinking about where the power would come from.  Other mages I work with who found their core paths themselves were doing the same thing.  That’s how you should find your core, too*.

*If you work with a mage who can find his core easily, have him connect to your mental areas and show you your core.  It is easier than finding it yourself.  But it requires having a teacher on hand.

Having a visualization should help you find core.  I visualize core going up.  Power flows down into my mind like an IV drips saline into my arm.

A friend visualizes core going in.  Core is part of your mental areas like mitochondria are part of a cell.

They’re just visualizations.  Neither is entirely accurate.  Try both and see what feels natural to you.

Once you find core, practice looking at the core paths for both new mental areas and mental areas you already use.  Notice how power flows through core for mental areas you’re using.

Activating Core Paths

Core divides as it goes from your source to your mental areas.  In computer science, this layout is called a tree:

Tree diagram from computer science

Your mental areas are at the bottom of the tree.  Your source is at the top.

If you pick two mental areas and trace their core paths, they will eventually meet.

This means that, if you trace up from the inactive core path for the mental area you just activated, it will eventually meet the path of an active mental area.  That core path will have power.  You can move power just like you move energy in your body.

Once you find that active part of core, grab some power and bring it down through the core paths to the new mental area.  Once the new core paths have power flowing through them, they will turn on and stay on.  If you start having difficulty bringing power to the next step in the core path, rest for half an hour to let the newly active core paths turn on more fully.

Summary

After activating a new mental area, reach up into its core until you find power.  Bring that power through core to the mental area.  Now it has its own power and won’t drain the power for the rest of your mind and body.

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Learn Magick Faster with Direct Mental Activation (Advanced Direct Magick)

Monday, May 31st, 2010

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Learning a new skill has two phases:

  1. Activate the mental muscles
  2. Learn the skill

Mental muscles drive magick.  Each mental area does a specific task.  Without the right mental muscles set up, you can’t begin learning the new skill.

Focused practice activates mental muscles.  Slowly.

This post is about how to use magick to activate mental muscles quickly so you can skip that slow practice-based activation and jump into learning the skill.

The Plan

  1. Find the mental muscles you’ll need for a skill
  2. Force energy through the muscles to activate them
  3. Connect core power to the new mental muscles
  4. Connect the new mental muscles to your brain

I’ll cover finding and activating the muscles today, and the rest in future posts.

Finding the Mental Muscles

To begin working with your mental muscles, trace a connection back to the mental area that made it.

Make a connection by looking at something.  Picture the connection going out your forehead (third eye chakra).  Hold the connection steady, make another connection to that connection, and trace the first connection back to your mind.  You’ll find the mental area that handles those connections.

Practice looking around your mental muscles until it becomes comfortable.  This will activate the mental muscles you’ll use for working with your mental muscles.  Use the focused practice technique you’ve been using.

Once looking around becomes easy, watch your mental muscles as you try a new skill.  Look for ones that you’re turning on.  Your mind is a big place, so it may take a few tries to find the new muscles.  But once you do, you know what you need to activate.

Direct Activation

Run energy through the mental muscles you’re activating, like you would run energy through an injury to heal it.

Use your own energy.  It has your underlying signature.  Just do an energy meditation.  Don’t use an external system’s energy, like Reiki, since they have a different signature.

Mental muscles take a lot less energy than physical tissue.  Overloading your mental muscles could damage them.  Start with a little energy and gradually increase it.  If you get a headache, back off. As long as it was just a little overload, the headache should dissipate in seconds.

Once the area starts activating, it will start drawing energy from your mind and connecting to your other mental muscles.  You’ll feel a drain on your mental power, like a powerful spirit’s energy drain, focused on the new area.  This is your signal to stop pushing energy through the area.

It usually takes a minute or two before the area starts activating.  Continuing to push energy through the area while it activates will tire you out and slow the process down, but it won’t cause any damage.  Energizing the area a little too long is better than doing it a little too short.

Next Steps

That was how to activate the mental area.  The next 2 posts will cover connecting your new area to its core power and to your brain.

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Are You Learning Psychic As Fast As Possible?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

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Enough theory. Time for a concrete example.

My girlfriend is improving her psychic skills using mental activation exercises.

She wants to get psychic information consciously as words, rather than impressions and images that drift into her conscious mind. She also wants to be able to ask follow-up questions like “why?”

Here’s her learning plan, adapted for someone who doesn’t have me to assist with each step.

Pick Your System

Psychic information comes from systems. Always.

Systems are non-physical, magickal structures that handle complex magickal tasks for you. Psychic systems figure out what will happen and feed relevant information to you.

You’ll need a system that can communicate with your conscious mind. If yours can’t, think about wanting a system that can while you reach out with a psychic query. You should get connected to the system you need.

For this project, I asked a spirit group I work with to recommend a system. They put me in touch with an expert on psychic systems, who recommended one that looks good.

Connecting to Your Brain

Mental areas drive specific magickal tasks.

To change how you communicate, you’ll need to work with your brain. Specifically the conscious part.

Before you can make any changes, you’ll need to practice looking around. This will activate the mental area that lets you view your brain, the first area of the mental application for working with your brain.

To find your brain, place your hand on your forehead or temple and connect to your head. Pause to notice the signature of the tissue you’re connected to (probably your skin and skull). Move in a bit, pausing periodically. When you reach your brain, the signature will change dramatically. You’ll know when you’ve found it.

Don’t try to change anything yet. Just practice looking around your brain.

Finding Your Conscious Mind

You must find the conscious part of your brain. The part the system wants to connect to. Then you can learn to communicate consciously.

Ask the system to show you where it wants to connect. Just focus on that intent, the same way you would focus on anything else you wanted to know. The system will handle the rest.

The system will give you a system-type connection to your brain. Connections have different types, and you’ll need a physical-type connection for the next step. Transitioning a single connection from system-type to physical-type is difficult.

Instead, make the system-type connection to your brain easy to find by putting a little extra energy on it. Then connect to your brain normally (with a physical-type connection) and look around until you find the energy from the system-type connection.

Practice this until it becomes easy, then practice finding the conscious area of the brain without the obvious energy. To test yourself, connect to what you think is the conscious part, then make the extra energy to make it obvious if you’re right.

Thinking with the Correct Brain Areas

Closing in on the point of this exercise, you’re ready to learn to think with the brain area the system will use to communicate with you (the “target brain area”).

Normally, you think with a large chunk of your brain. Lots of brain areas. Each one gets a different signature with each thought that enters your mind.

The system wants to grab all those signatures from the target brain area. You need to move them there.

Connect to the target brain area like in the previous step. Think a simple sentence, one concept* at a time, and focus on moving each concept to the target brain area. Your mind should know what to do.

*One concept might be one word, like “runs,” or a few words, like “the red house.”

This exercise will activate the mental areas that handle moving thoughts around. Your brain will also grow new thought pathways as you make thoughts flow to the target brain area. It will be tiring at first.

In a few days it should become easy. That’s when you’re ready for the last step.

Conscious Psychic Communication

Now that your mental areas and brain are prepared, communicating with your conscious mind should be easy.

Tell the psychic system to start communicating with your conscious mind instead of your unconscious. Just connect to it with that intent. It will know how. It may have already noticed that your conscious mind was capable of communicating and started using it.

Try asking specific questions and reading details you receive. Try follow-up questions to the information you get. Conscious communication should allow you to push your psychic queries further than you have before.

The Pattern

Even if you don’t do psychic, the pattern for learning a new skill will still be useful:

  1. Practice looking around the general area until it becomes easy
  2. Practice finding the specific point you’ll work on until it becomes easy
  3. Practice each step of the task until it becomes easy
  4. Once each step is easy, try the whole task
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Learn Magick Faster by Practicing Smarter

Monday, May 24th, 2010

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Athletes don’t just practice their technique. They also life weights and do endurance training. Focused practice leads to greater ability.

Same in magick. Your mind needs to strengthen its mental areas before you can learn a skill. Focused practice can help you learn new skills faster.

Learning a New Skill

Say you want to learn energy healing, but you haven’t worked with the human body before. The domain is the physical body, and the task is altering energy in injured tissue.

Here’s how to learn any new skill (not just energy healing):

  1. Strengthen mental areas for looking at the domain
  2. Strengthen mental areas for altering the domain
  3. Practice the task

Why Strengthen Mental Areas First

Because the skill won’t work without them.

Mental areas drive magick effects. They are the motor cortex (deciding exactly what to move) and the muscle (moving external reality) when you do magick.

Most mental areas are inactive. Either they were never active, or they’ve gone dormant from disuse. Either way, you need to activate them.

Each mental area has a specific task, like viewing a certain domain of magickal structure, altering that domain’s energy signatures, etc. You need to set up the mental areas for each domain separately.

Practicing the task (energy healing, for example) will set up the mental areas for that domain. But focused practice can set them up faster and easier.

How To Strengthen Mental Areas

Practice.

But focused practice. One mental area at a time.

First, use the mental area for looking at the domain (the energy layer of the human body, for example). This lets you find the specific spot to work on (injured tissue, for example). Just practice looking around.

Then practice looking at that specific domain (injured tissue, for example). Sometimes this will activate another mental area, sometimes it will just strengthen the one you already activated.

Then, practice each change you’ll need to make, one at a time. For example, with energy healing, you would need to change the energy signature in the area, and change the energy paths so they deliver the energy to the tissue better. Each is handled by a different mental area, so practice each individually.

Once all the mental areas are active, and you’ve used each one a few times, then try doing the whole procedure (for example, energy healing). You’ll find it much easier than before you did the focused practice.

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How Your Mind Does Magick

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

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This series shows you how to prepare your mind to drive magick.

Most mages let external structures drive magick for them. They use visualization or ritual to send their intent to The Universe, or a ritual element, or some other name they assign their specific system. The system handles the rest.

Your mind can drive magick. You don’t need a system. But the parts of your mind that drive magick need exercise or they atrophy. In most mages, they’re inactive.

This series shows you how to activate them.

Note: This is part of Step 3 of learning to control magick consciously. Do Step 1 and Step 2 first.

Putting Thought Into Action

Most thoughts do not become action.

Imagining moving your arm doesn’t engage the motor cortex of your brain. Actually moving your arm does. Arm movement is immediately caused by muscles tensing. But it’s also caused by engaging the right parts of your brain.

Your Mental Muscles

Magick is driven by non-physical, magickal structures connected to your brain called mental areas. They have the role of your motor cortex (turning an intent into specific commands) plus your muscles (executing those commands in the physical world).

You have dozens of mental areas, each one dedicated to a specific task (one for physical effects, another for communicating with systems, a third for handling connections, etc).

Unlike systems (which are shared by all users), your mental areas belong to you.

As you practice magick, more mental areas will come online and connect to your brain.

Note: In later writing, I use the term “mental muscles” instead of “mental areas.” They are synonyms.

Doing Magick Consciously

Doing magick consciously lets you learn new skills faster and understand magick better.

When most mages start, their mental areas are connected to unconscious parts of their brain. That’s why you use ritual and visualization to communicate intent to your unconscious: that’s the path to your mental areas.

Start thinking about what your unconscious is doing as you do magick. This will trigger your mental areas will make new connections to your conscious mind. You can also develop consciousness in some unconscious brain areas, similar to how biofeedback can give you conscious control of your heartbeat.

Simply trying to become conscious of how you’re doing magick begins the process.

Note

In this series, I sometimes use my old term, “Mental Areas,” instead of my current term, “Mental Muscles.” They are synonyms.

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All content copyright 2017 by Mike Sententia.

Mike offers energy healing, not medical care. He is an energy practitioner, not a physician. He does not treat or cure medical conditions. The state of California does not regulate energy healing, including the healing techniques he offers. Testimonials are intended for informational purposes only; the opinions, statements, and other information are solely those of the author. Mike makes no claim that use of his services will result in a similar or successful outcome. Full disclaimer here.