Magick of Thought

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This is the least sexy title I’ve given an article in a long time. I did it on purpose. Today, I just want to talk to my long-time readers and true fans, those of you willing to wrestle with hard ideas to go somewhere cool with me.

Last time I talked about communicating with words rather than intents, I oversimplified my magick. I thought it was just the normal simplifying everyone does when they explain an idea, but after talking with Ananael and writing this article, I’m realizing it truly was oversimplifying. Today I want to fix that, but it’s going to take some effort on both our parts to do it. Thus, the unsexy title.

On my post about doubt and manifesting, Ananael left some really excellent questions about manifesting and ethereal software. I’m going to answer them one at a time.

Here are two other posts to help new readers get up to speed on this topic. Note: The term “system” is an old synonym for what I now call “ethereal software.”

Ananael says:

The thing is, doubt does effect manifestation. It shows up in my own experiments and those of every other magician I’ve ever spoken with on the subject, with the possible exception of you.

Thank you for your honesty. It helps me know where I’m not connecting.

This is one of the things I’ve been trying to explain, though I haven’t quite gotten there. Direct magick isn’t just a different way of looking at the same things. It’s about seeing more of magick’s moving parts than other styles, and using those extra parts to solve problems that other styles simply cannot. I’m not at all surprised that other mages, working without the parts I use and the techniques I’ve developed, cannot produce the same results. But I feel pompous and arrogant saying so, and I probably won’t be this blunt in general.

Part of it is, a bold claim like that requires substantial evidence, and I simply haven’t written enough case studies yet to expect anyone to jump on board yet. That’s one of my projects for this year.

Ananael says:

That’s one of the things that makes me somewhat skeptical about your “ethereal software” model, because I agree that the way you formulate it implies that doubt should be a non-factor.

Whether doubt matters depends on what you send to the ethereal software. See, the transmission is imperfect, particularly if the software has to handle 100% of the communication — and unless you are doing specific techniques I’ll write about soon, that’s the default. If it’s reading your mind, it will pick up the gist of the entire contents, but not the details. It will receive doubt mixed with your goal, rather than a complex sentence like “I’m doubting this will work but I really want you to ignore that doubt.”

Also, doubt about magick or manifesting in general may interfere with your mental posture, preventing you from properly engaging your mental muscles. In this post, I’m talking about doubting your ability to do this specific manifesting, not magick or manifesting in general.

Some of my models are conjecture, and some are based on personal experience. This one is based on personal experience. As I learned to help spirits and ethereal software by doing some steps of the communication myself, I’ve seen how imprecise the messages were. One of my exercises was to have a spirit read my thoughts and then repeat them back to me. Now, this is tricky, because you know what the answer should be, so you can very easily just hear what you know you should be receiving. But if you quiet your thoughts and really listen to the message from the spirit, you can see how the precision of what they read improves as you handle more of the communication, and how bad it is when they handle everything.

So, in summary: By default, ethereal software will handle 100% of the communication, which means it imprecisely picks up the entire contents of your mind, including doubts and anger and other things you didn’t intend to send.

Does that help clarify why doubt matters, even with ethereal software reading your intent?

Ananael says:

Now as for your explanation that the ethereal software can read your mental state and somehow incorporates it into your magick regardless of your stated intent, doesn’t that fly completely in the face of your idea that you should program ethereal software with words? If the software is reading your mind anyway and incorporating your thoughts into whatever it’s manifesting, it would seem to me that the precision of your language would be pointless in terms of the end result. Or am I missing something in your explanation?

This is that oversimplification I talked about. Here’s the complex version.

When I talked about communicating in words, I wasn’t referring to the practice of writing down your intent, or speaking your goals out loud. I was talking about the difference between focusing on your overall intent — which forces the ethereal software to read that overall intent all at once — vs focusing on one concept at a time, and sending the message one concept at a time, as just the intellectual concept, separate from any emotions. (The words, rather than the emotion or overall intent).

“Concept” is a vague word, so I talked about communicating in words. But I think that was misleading, because the significant part is not words vs images vs some other way of thinking. The significant part is sending one concept to time vs sending the whole intent all at once, and controlling the message to remove unhelpful emotions. Even if you’ve written down your intent, unless you’re doing specific magick techniques to step through the message as you communicate, you’re probably relying on the ethereal software to handle 100% of the communication, and you wind up sending the message as a whole, emotions and all.

Let me explain the emotional connotations a bit. Just like a spoken word carries an emotional tone and facial expression in addition to the actual word you speak, the concept you send carries the state of your mind, including the signatures of the parts that feel emotions. When I receive a message from a spirit, I can tell whether they’re distracted, excited to hear from me, or worried about something, based just on how they say hello. I feel their emotion and mental state when I read their message, like a tone of voice in my mind. (I only noticed these details of the communication when I started handling more of the communication. I couldn’t receive the emotions when the spirit was handling 100% of the communication.)

So, if you send the concept “make me successful,” along with the emotion of doubting that you will be successful, the ethereal software will pick that up. But, if you send one concept at that time (“make me” “successful”), you can focus on that one concept and control what emotions get attached to it. For manifesting, I prefer sending flat, unemotional words. There is a technique to doing that, too, that goes beyond breaking your message into individual concepts. But sending individual concepts leads to controlling which parts of your mind get included in the message, which leads to controlling the emotions attached to the method. So it’s at least three steps removed from the normal communication that ethereal software does by default.

Having written that, I see that it’s quite complicated. I forget that sometimes. I’ll write more about how to learn these techniques as I write the book. Thanks for reading all this and helping me figure out how to explain it.

At this point, let me ask: Does this help clarify what I’m talking about? Do you see why I can use these techniques to get results that other mages don’t get? Am I on the right track in explaining all this? Thanks.