Bypassing Magickal Shields (Advanced Direct Magick)

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

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This week’s theme is fighting. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Fighting With Magick.

Bypassing Shielding

In magick fighting, everything has a counter.  The mage with the better understanding of how magick works, and the greater experience to apply that understanding, will usually win.

Today: How to bypass shielding.  Shielding from a wall visualization, or the shielding from earlier this week.

To bypass shielding, use smaller connections.

Scales of Connections

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.

Rope has specific words for several scales, so I’ll use the rope analogy for this post.

Scales of Signatures

Signatures also have scale.  A large-scale signature is made of smaller-scale signatures.  If we’re using a rope-scale signature, then twine-scale signatures are the aspects of the larger signature.

A rope-scale connection has a rope-scale signature.  The twine-scale connections that make it up have twine-scale signatures. They add up to the rope-scale connection’s signature.

Blocking Connections

Filling a connection with awareness happens at a certain scale.

Say you work at the “rope” scale. There’s one scale larger (heavy rope) and several scales smaller (twine, thread, etc).

You fill a rope-scale connection with awareness.  This fills most of the twine-scale connections that make it up. Most, but not all.

Anyone using a rope-scale connection would use some of the same twine-scale connections, making them obvious to you.

But there are holes at the twine-scale.

Sneaking In

Sneak in by making a twine-scale connection with the same signature as one of their open twine-scale connections.

Make a bunch of lightweight* twine-scale or thread-scale connections. Eventually you will want to handle many small connections at once, but at first it’s fine to focus on one at a time. If you can decompose the large-scale connection’s signature into its aspects, make your small-scale connections each have one of those aspects, so your connections align to the small connections you will be entering.

*Lightweight connections don’t push. They look around but don’t change things. Keep the connection soft, so it can adjust to the signature of whatever it touches, and don’t put any energy through it.

Look at the rope-scale connection with these smaller-scale connections. At the rope-scale you see a wall, but at the smaller scale you’ll see some openings. Each connection will see openings that allow its signature. Enter the opening like you would trace any connection.

Assembling a Signature

You have some twine-scale connections into your opponent, but you normally userope-scale connections, not twine-scale ones. You’ll want to assemble a rope-scale connection once you’re past their shield.

Snake several twine-scale connections into them. Bring them together on the other side, and think about joining them, braiding them, fusing them, or whatever makes sense to you. You’ll get a rope-scale connection.

The signature of the rope-scale connection is the sum of the signatures of the twine-scale connections. Those signatures are determined by the holes your opponent left in their shield. So your rope-scale connection might not have a signature you’re used to.

To get better control of the resulting signature, sneak in more twine-scale connections.  Or sneak in thread-scale connections, build twine-scale connections similar to what you’re used to, and use them to build a rope-scale connection.

Bringing Down the Shield

Once you’re in, find the part of their mind that maintains their shield. Fill its connections with your awareness. Resist their attempts to use those connections. This will stop that part of their mind from functioning, bringing down their shield.

What About Walls?

Visualizations tell you to imagine an “impenetrable wall.” How can you bypass such a thing?

Sorry, just because imagine something as impenatrable doesn’t mean it is. Visualizations tell your unconscious what magick to do, but that magick works the same as all other magick.  Small-scale connections can still sneak in.

Defending Yourself

If you use a rope-scale shield, twine-scale connections can get to you.

If you use a thread-scale shield, twine-scale connections won’t get anywhere.

Whatever scale they attack with, shield with one scale smaller.  Whatever scale they shield with, attack with 1-2 scales smaller.

Types of Connections

There are many types of connections: connections to systems, physical connections, mental connections, energy-layer connections, etc. Each has a different basic signature at the thread scale.

If you use a type your opponent doesn’t know about, they won’t have any awareness protecting those connections. You can easily enter with a rope-scale connection.  On offense, try all the types of connections you can, and see what gets in most easily.

On defense, fill all the types of connections you use with awareness, so you’re prepared for that type of attack.

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Fighting for Ritual Mages

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

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This week’s theme is fighting. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Fighting With Magick.

Most ritual mages have rituals to banish spirits and prevent attacks.  Here are some tips to make ritual-based fighting more effective.

Use a Serious Ritual Style

“Serious” is hard to define, but you’ll know it when you see it.  Golden Dawn is a serious ritual system.  Gardnerian Wicca, too.  And Kabbalah, Enochian, Voodoo, …

A candle, a ribbon and a poem is not a serious ritual.  It can focus your intent for simple magick like moving energy in the body.  But intent alone isn’t effective for protection. You either need direct magick techniques, or the external forces (“systems“) that come with a serious ritual style.

Speed

Speed wins fights.  A direct magick attack hits much faster than a ritual.

Against a spirit draining your energy, you can tough it out and get through the ritual.  But against someone who alters your mind’s energy to bind your magickal abilities, you need to prevent their attack in real time.

Some options (feel free to pick several):

  1. Learn to notice and resist attacks with direct magick, to give you time to respond.
  2. Make a quick ritual, using the ritual elements of your style, but in a shortened form.
  3. Use the ritual system directly.  See this post for details.

#1 is what this week is about.

In #2, you learn to put as much focus into the shortened ritual as the long one. As you get better with shortened rituals, you can learn to visualize the ritual instead of doing it (option #3) so you can use magick in public and when you’re away from your ritual supplies. The point is the same: Use the ritual forces quickly enough to be viable in a serious fight.

I want to be clear: Don’t do a “tie a ribbon around a candle” ritual.  But once you’re initiated and experienced in a ritual style, you can use the magickal system without a full ritual.  That’s the serious mage’s do it yourself rituals, and it’s a good stepping stone to direct magick.

Limits of the System

The systems behind ritual magick weren’t designed to do every bit of magick you might ever want to do. At that point, you need to do magick directly.

It might be an attacker that can bypass the wall-like shield your banishing ritual creates.  It might be someone that hacks your system and denies you access.  Particularly for fighting, where someone is opposing you, you will hit the limits of the system. But at some point, you will need to do something your system can’t handle.

That’s why this site is here. I’ve been doing magick directly for about 20 years. It doesn’t hit a ceiling the way styles that channel outside forces do.  Ultimately, you will want direct magick for protection. Maybe for everything else, too.

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Effective Psychic/Magickal Shielding

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

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This week’s theme is fighting. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Fighting With Magick.

Don’t think of shielding as a wall surrounding you. A wall doesn’t let you see what’s happening on the other side. A wall can be scaled or tunneled through, and you’ll be caught by surprise. A wall isn’t good shielding.

Good shielding has 3 goals:

  • Make incoming connections obvious to you
  • Slow attacks down so you can respond
  • Make you less noticeable to attackers

Don’t Visualize A White Shell

Google “Psychic shielding.” You’ll get a lot of variations of “visualize a white light surrounding you.” The white light is energy you’re sending out to keep attackers at bay.

It’s bad shielding.

  1. Energy doesn’t help you notice attacks. Worse, the noise from the additional energy makes it harder to notice connections.
  2. Energy will only stop a novice. Anyone good will force disruptive energy directly into your mind, bypassing the energy shell.
  3. Sending out energy makes you more obvious. Which means more attackers. Epic. Fail.

Active Shielding

Shielding isn’t about stopping attacks. It’s about slowing them down so you can respond. Being aware of incoming connections, and ready to resist them, is the best shielding I know.

To shield a connection, fill it with your awareness. Just look at it, think about grabbing it or entering it.  Keep it in your thoughts.

Anyone using the connection will have to push you out. It’s obvious. And having your awareness there means you’re ready to respond.

Remember, it’s awareness, not energy. Energy is noisy and obvious. Don’t flood your connection with energy.

Maintaining Shielding

Maintaining awareness of your connections doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes practice, and a series of exercises building up to a constant, relaxed alertness.

First, get comfortable placing your awareness in a few connections while you’re totally focused on it.  Then, place your awareness in your connections (while you’re focused) and maintain it while you do a simple task, like driving or cooking.  Then start while you’re distracted with that simple task, finding the connections and becoming aware of them.

Then build up on 2 fronts:

  • Distraction.  Increase the complexity of the task (reading, talking, etc) while maintaining awareness in your connections.
  • Completeness.  Increase the number and type (see below) of connections you are protecting.

Build up slowly over a few months, doing a few short sessions each day, while you practice whatever else you are learning.

Types of Connections

When I first learned shielding, I was only aware of  basic magick connections.  The kind you make to systems or spirits.

Some attacks snuck in by using other kinds of connections:

  • Connections to the physical area (“physical connections”)
  • Connections using my mental signature (“mental connections”)
  • Connections along the energy layers of either mental or physical

You’ll eventually want to maintain awareness in those connections, too.  I say “eventually” because you need to start working in those domains before you can shield them.  I couldn’t shield physical connections until I learned energy healing, for example.  So keep shielding in mind as you learn other magick skills.

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Effective Energy Attacks

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

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This week’s theme is fighting. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Fighting With Magick.

Overwhelming your opponent with energy doesn’t work very well.

But you can still use your experience building and channeling energy to win fights. The key is to force disruptive energy directly into their mind.

The Plan

Mental areas are non-physical structures connected to your brain that drive magick.  They don’t work when their energy signature is too far outside of its normal range.

That’s what disruptive energy does: shifts the energy signature of a magickal structure so far that it stops working.

Connections, mental areas, systems — they’re all structures. Forcing disruptive energy into them will disable them. They’ll start working again once the energy dissipates.

This disruption is the mechanics behind “overloading someone with energy”. Overloading them forces energy into every structure. With so much energy everywhere, any individual structure can’t help but shift signature. Eventually, the structures shut down.

But overloading is slow. Energy absorbed by the body might make your opponent feel lousy, but it won’t stop them from hitting you.  Skilled opponents can resist an overall overload, or just channel the energy themselves. Overloading just isn’t practical.

Instead, force a disruptive energy directly into your opponent’s mental areas. Because the energy is focused, it takes much less effort to shut their mind down. The damage happens quicker and is harder to resist. Because mental areas are the seat of magick, disabling just a few can slow your opponent down and scare them off.

Disruptive Energy Signatures

A disruptive signature is one that clashes with the structure’s normal signature. Think of it as the opposite of healing energy.

Signatures have layers. The surface layer is the current state of the structure: alert vs sleeping, healthy vs injured. The underlying signature is “their” signature. It’s the same for their whole body and mind. And it’s what we want to attack.

Energy healing adjusts the surface signature while matching the underlying signature. An energy attack is the inverse.  It disrupts the underlying signature.

To get started, visualize shaking the person’s mind, or think about the person’s signature and suppressing all the high-energy parts of it. They will do slightly different things, but both will be a decent attack. I’ll do a series on signatures one of these weeks.

The first time you try, it’ll be hard to figure out a disruptive signature. After trying 10 times, it will become easy. So practice on yourself first.

Look at your energy signature. Think of one that would interfere with it. Build that energy and put it in your head. If you do it right, it will be uncomfortable and hard to focus.  But it won’t hurt you long-term.  I did it just now to verify the exercise works, so you can do it to learn the skill.

To recover, stop producing the disruptive energy, and flush the area with energy in your normal signature.

Once you get this down, practice with other people. If you train with friends, practice on each other. If not, connect to random people on the street and figure out what signature to use, but don’t hit them with it.  It won’t affect non-mages that much, anyway.

Forcing Energy Into Their Mind

Winning fights is about being fast. Fast in defending their attack. Fast in tracing to your opponent.  And fast in disabling them.

Flooding your opponent’s body with disruptive energy is slow. The body can absorb a lot of energy and keep on fighting. Shielding can deflect a lot of energy too.

But once your energy disrupts their mind, they can’t do magick anymore.  Fight’s over.

Recovery

Energy effects dissipate naturally. Your opponent should be capable of doing magick after a few minutes, and be completely recovered in a few hours. Don’t feel guilty about attacking to defending yourself.

During those few minutes they can’t do magick, remove their connections. Find the connections, and visualize grabbing them and pulling them out of your body and mind. This, combined with the unpleasant experience they just had fighting you, should keep them from bothering you again.

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Blocking a Magick Attack

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

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This week’s theme is fighting. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Fighting With Magick.

Waiting until you notice the fatigue and distraction of a spirit draining you is like discovering that your house is on fire by seeing it on the news. It’s too late.

You should notice the initial connections an attacker makes, before they do any damage. That’s your smoke alarm. Here’s how.

Noticing Connections

The connection will be in the spirit’s signature. Or its best impersonation of your signature. But it won’t be quite your signature. So that’s what to look for.

The problem is, you don’t have just one signature. You have a range of signatures, constantly shifting from one to another. It’s easy to mimic a signature that blends into that noise.

Steadying your energy signature is the first step to spotting connections.

Steadying Your Energy

Steadying your energy signature isn’t just for when you think someone is attacking you. It’s something you do all the time. So you notice everyone’s signatures around you, to pick up their emotions. So you can control your energy-based healing. And so you can notice hostile connections.

Steadying your energy is something you learn and practice over a few weeks. Just reading won’t teach you the skill, but the exercises in this article can help you teach yourself.

First, do an energy meditation until it’s easy to build your energy, so you can recognize when you have a lot of energy (during the meditation) and when you don’t (the rest of the time, probably).

Then, do the opposite. Meditate to steady your energy. Not suppress it, but quiet it.

Suppressing (which we don’t want to do) would be imagining the energy inside your body becoming dim and dieing. That’s bad.

Steadying (which we want to do) would be imagining your energy emitting a constant level of light, which extends an inch outside your skin but no further. It’s still there, but controlled, only in the spots you want.

I also call this “Quieting your energy.” Like quieting a humming appliance, it allows you to notice the other, subtler things you missed before.

Once you get good at quieting your energy during meditation, quiet it while doing rote tasks like cooking or driving. Then add more complex tasks like reading, writing, or talking, until you are controlling your energy output all the time.

Grabbing Their Connection

Once your energy is steady, foreign connections become obvious. In the part of your body where the connection enters, you’ll feel the cool tingling of someone staring at you. You’ll notice a change in how much energy you have there, too, along with a change in its signature. And you’ll notice very quickly if an energy drain begins.

You want to control their connection to prevent them from going deeper and to prevent them from withdrawing. If they withdraw, they may come back later when you’re distracted or tired.

Focus on the spot where you feel the connection, but don’t tense your mind or body. Feel around the area with your mind. You’ll notice the connection. Visualize grabbing it. Hold on.

Blocking an Attack

You’ve grabbed their connection. Before tracing back to them, you should prevent them from using it. Otherwise, you’ll have to worry about them damaging you as you hit them back.

Trace the connection toward them. Not all the way to them, not even halfway. Just far enough that it’s outside your space. You will notice a change in the background signature that the connection travels over. It will change from your signature to a less noticeable signature when you get outside your space.

Grab the connection there. Visualize a cap on the connection, preventing the attacker from sending any energy or force past the cap into you. Then, while still holding the connection, trace it the rest of the way to the attacker.

Counters

Everything in this article can be countered. That’s just the nature of magick fighting, or any fighting really. All of those counters can be countered, too. I’ll cover some counters in the advanced post this week.

But just because they can be countered doesn’t mean they’re worthless. These techniques are the building blocks for everything else. And they will let you handle a lot more than you could yesterday.

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Fighting With Magick

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

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If you outlaw catapults, then only the outlaws will have catapults -Socrates

Fighting is essential to practicing magick. You must be able to defend yourself from spirits who try to steal the energy that keeps your body alert and mages with immature tempers.

There are no police. The bad guys know how to fight. You should too.

A Magickal Fight

You feel distracted, suddenly tired, and the cool tingling of someone watching you.

The distraction is from a spirit altering your energy so you won’t fight back. The fatigue is that spirit absorbing your body’s energy. The tingling is from its connections shifting your magickal structures as they enter your body.

The best way to get a spirit off you, to make yourself an undesirable meal, is to hit back. Casting a circle, burning sage, or imagining a white light won’t be as effective as attacking the spirit yourself.

First, find the connection. Start at the source of the tingling. The connection will have the spirit’s signature, so look for anything with an unfamiliar signature.

Block the spirit’s energy and connections by putting mental weight where the connection enters your body. If you are distracted and tired, you won’t put up much of a fight. This should reduce those effects.

Trace the connection back to the spirit. Enter its mind. Damage it until it leaves you alone.

Fundamentals of Fighting

Most fights start when you are attacked. At least, this is my hope in writing this article. It’s about how to defend yourself, not about delivering the first blow.

Most fights then go through these steps:

  • Defense. Prevent the attacker from damaging you.
  • Trace the attacker’s connections back to them.
  • Offense. Enter their mind, damage them.

Defense

Before you can win, you must avoid getting hurt long enough to fight back.

Sometimes, your attacker will get frustrated and give up.  More often, defenses are a temporary measure to buy time for a counter-attack.

A static shield will help buy that time, but bypassing shielding isn’t hard. I’ll write about it later this week. A shield should prepare you for an active defense, not replace one.

Cleansing rituals rely on a system to remove the attacker’s connections. They require time to execute, and are only as strong as the system. I would use them as a final step to remove connections after winning a fight, rather than as a first line of defense.

The active, first line of defense is applying mental weight to your magickal body.  Fill the part of your body being attacked with your connections and energy. Push back against whatever changes your opponent is making, or just hold the structures firm.

Your goal is to avoid taking too much damage while you find their connection, so you can advance to…

Tracing Their Connection

Before you can counter-attack, you must find your attacker by tracing their connection back to them.

To find their connection, look in the area you are defending for what is pushing against you.  It will have a foreign signature.  This will be the attacker’s connection.

For many attackers, the connection will go straight to them, passing through a system along the way.  You can trace it just by holding the connection with your mind and thinking about finding its source.

For more advanced attackers, you will need to trace the connection through several signature shifts intended to disguise it. I’ll write about tracing hidden connections soon.

Offense

Flinging energy at your opponent from far away requires a lot of effort for very little effect. Your opponent can apply weight to their structures to prevent you from doing damage.

But a small amount of energy applied precisely inside your opponent’s mind can end the fight.

Offense is about access, about entering your opponent’s mind and shifting his signatures to disrupt his ability to do magick. It doesn’t take a lot of energy.  But it does take access to his mind.

You have to get in, in order to win. It’s important. So I made it rhyme.

Trace to your opponent. Enter his mind. Flood it with an energy incompatible with its current signature. I assure you, this will do more damage than building energy in your body and flinging it at them.

Winning

Two things make you win fights: Speed, and breadth of ability.

Fighting is fast. You defend an area by applying mental weight, so the attacker shifts to another part of your body. You trace their connection, so the attacker drops it and starts a new connection for a new attack. Whoever is faster usually wins.

Fighting is also about breadth of ability. If you only use connections to systems, you cannot defend against connections to your body, mind, etc. If you know a domain your opponent doesn’t, you can get into their mind even if you are much slower. Experience with a different domain is a huge advantage.

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