Magick of Thought

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

They say that, at Toyota, there are seven “whys.” You keep asking why until you get to what really matters.

Why have large pistons? So you get lots of horsepower. While lots of horsepower? So you can go fast. Why go fast? So you can get to the airport on time. Then, they make their ad about getting to the airport on time, and at the end of it, tell you about the horsepower. It solves a problem, so it resonates in a way that just talking about horsepower wouldn’t.

In this series, I asked, “Why consciously step through your magick?” Answer: So you can develop better techniques.

But, Why? Obviously, it’s better to have better techniques, but what’s the big idea behind that? If your goal is results in the physical world, why study magick, rather than biomedical research?

So, my answer to that Why: To build magick into a mature, respected field. That’s what it’s really about.

Understanding how magick works — all the way from your visualization through the forces it invokes to the physical change in the world — is part of that. Developing results on par with modern science is part of that, too.

But the real motivation, and the goal I hope everyone can agree on (even if we don’t agree on the way to get there), is building magick into a mature, respected field.

Now, to package up these couple thousand words, spread over four posts, into a three paragraph front page and a one sentence tagline.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

In this series, I’m figuring out my reasons behind direct magick. You’ll get to see my thought process. If you want a polished 3-paragraph answer, come back in a week.

It’s hard to compare magick results — where we’re amazed by any result at all — to everyday amazing results we take for granted, like antibiotics, computers and airplanes.

So let’s look at a not-yet-everyday amazement:

In 1969, physicists put a man on the moon. One of the pinnacles of a mature science, and truly amazing in its own right. But also, one one we’re not numb to, because it’s not an everyday event.

Watch the video. Feel that amazement. That’s what I want out of magick: Results that aren’t just amazing because they work at all, but genuinely amazing in their own right.

But what does that mean? And how can I speculate about amazing results without over-promising, or sounding like a fluffy new-ager going on about how magick can solve every problem everywhere ever?

My answer, at least today, is to start with results I’m getting now, and extrapolate 10 or 20 or 50 years. Something I think I could accomplish in my career, though some of these will probably turn out to be too hard, and I doubt I’ll be able to tackle all of them any time soon.

To put that time frame in perspective, I’ve been studying magick for 20 years, met my first mentor in 2002, and started energy healing in late 2006. Most of the techniques I write about were developed in a day to a month. So a decade of dedicated research is a lot of time for improvement.

What might that result in? This is speculative, but here are a few possibilities:

Healing techniques for autoimmune diseases: Hives is an autoimmune disease. The person’s own immune system attacks their body. In a month, I worked out healing techniques, and Lisa went from “Miserable and can’t focus” to “Moderately itchy but functional.” I still have to generalize it to other clients, but that’s a matter of debugging, and seems imminently doable.

Big picture: Autoimmune diseases are crippling. Multiple sclerosis is the best-known, but lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are also common. They all function in basically the same way as hives. Maybe the healing techniques would generalize too.

Nerve damage: I’ve had two friends with spinal injuries that caused numbness and lack of mobility in the legs. One required a walker. After a healing session focusing on their nerves, both reported restored feeling and mobility. The healing technique didn’t attempt to work with the disk pressing on their spines, so the improvements weren’t permanent (it lasted 24 hours for the one with the walker, and a week or so for the other one, though she can refresh the healing energy herself now). But it shows tremendous promise, especially for people who have had surgery to remove the underlying cause of that damage.

Big picture: Nerve damage is one of the most common causes of paralysis. And if these techniques generalize from the spine to the brain, they may be able to help with brain injuries, too.

Communication – Insight: When I communicate with a spirit, I receive its concepts, as they exist in its mind. Most of the time, that concepts maps easily to a word or phrase. But sometimes, it’s a foreign concept, something I’ve never thought or heard before. Simply reading that concept into my thoughts teaches me about them and how they think.

Big picture: If we could do this reliably with other people, we could more fully stand in one another’s shoes. That’s a different sort of amazing the medical cures, but understanding your fellow man is still properly amazing.

Communication – Mind reading: When a mage channels a spirit, the spirit reads his thoughts, and writes its response into his mind. A mage can learn to do that, too, so other mages can channel them. I’m halfway there: I package my thoughts in a way that’s easy for the spirits to read in, and can receive those packaged thoughts, too. It makes it easier for spirits to talk to me, particularly spirits that don’t work with humans much and don’t know how to read and write our minds.

Big Picture: Being channeled would be cool, but only useful for situations where you can’t email. It would let spirits introduce me to other mages, but that’s about it. But with a few more improvements, reading thoughts a mage intends you to pick up could generalize into simply reading thoughts. Which would be incredibly useful.

Consciousness integration: You’re familiar with having different desires and unconscious worries in your mind, some from childhood and not adjusted to the adult world? In 2010, I developed a technique to connect those parts of your mind to your conscious mind. Once connected, the parts of your mind will talk, the unconscious part will update itself to the adult world, and you stop having those nagging fears and worries. It’s like a year of personal growth in a weekend. I call it the “technology of enlightenment.”

Big picture: This one actually isn’t extrapolating much. I’ve done it on myself, and done it a bit for Lisa, so I know the technique generalizes to others. I just haven’t figured out how to market it, and it’s too advanced to teach on this blog anytime soon. But maybe this is something I should return to.

I’ve also had success with relieving nerve pain, long-term results on joint pain in Lisa’s knees and my knuckles (write-up on that coming), healing techniques for colds in a way that could generalize to drug-resistant infections, and relieving cramping when I passed a kidney stone. And I didn’t even touch on manifesting, since influencing events is so much harder to extrapolate.

I don’t expect to do all these things in 10 years, or even 50. And some are probably infeasible.

But hopefully, I’ve sketched out what I mean by “genuinely amazing magick,” and shown you stretch goals I think are reasonably possible, instead of the over-promising that marketers are known for or the un-grounded hopes of fluffy new agers.

Conclusion

So, that’s my Why of direct magick: To make magick that’s genuinely amazing, not “amazing that it works at all.” I still have to figure out how to put that into a few paragraphs on my front page, and sum it up in one sentence for the tagline (in the header). But that’s where I am.

I’d love to know what you think.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

In this series, I’m figuring out my reasons behind direct magick. You’ll get to see my thought process. If you want a polished 3-paragraph answer, come back in a week.

When something is truly, amazingly effective, it permeates our lives, and we forget it’s amazing.

Medicine reliably, routinely heals people who would otherwise die. Computers connect us to nearly every piece of human knowledge, from our living room, in our pajamas. Airplanes can put you anywhere in the world in about 24 hours.

Those are all amazing results. But we aren’t amazed by them because we expect them to work.

Magick is the opposite: We expect very little, then we’re amazed when we get any noticeable results at all. I get how hard it is to produce any noticeable results, and how much skill it takes to do that reliably, and I get how exciting it is to see your magick work and know that it’s real, because I’ve lived through all those things.

But think about it like this: A five-year-old playing the violin (without screeching) is amazing. And the New York Philharmonic is amazing. But one is amazing because of how little we expect, and the other is amazing because, well, it’s genuinely amazing.

Magick, as a field, needs to grow up. It has to move beyond “Any useful result is amazing,” and adopt the genuinely-amazing bar of every other field. That’s the only way we’re ever going to produce results on par with modern science.

I want magick so effective and reliable that it permeates our lives the way computers and medicine have. And to do that, we have to disassemble magick into its building blocks, and build something new.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

In this series, I’m figuring out my reasons behind direct magick. You’ll get to see my thought process. If you want a polished 3-paragraph answer, come back in a week.

There are two components of the Why: Curiosity, and results.

Originally, I pursued direct magick out of curiosity. What happens after you send out your intent? How is the change in the world implemented? What are the mechanics that underlie all magick, from rituals to energy healing to belief-based Chaos Magick?

I started magick at age 11, and was on that curiosity-driven path by age 14. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about results, and I hardly knew about traditional occultism. (The concept of a ritual? Sure. How to do the LBRP? Nope.)

But why, in the years since, have I kept with direct magick? Surely, an established style is easier, with more answers, more social support, and easier networking for blogs and classes and books. So why haven’t I adopted it?

I think the answer is this: Doing traditional magick is more of the same. It doesn’t scratch my need to explore, but more than that, it won’t revolutionize magick.

And magick needs a revolution. A few hundred years ago, before sterilization and anesthetics and antibiotics, medicine was roughly as effective as energy healing is today: We could promote healing, maybe help the person feel better, but it couldn’t do much for terminal patients. Today, medicine does objectively amazing things, but magick is still so ineffective* that we’re amazed when we get any results at all.

*Compared with modern science. Doctors beat energy healers, email beats telepathy, and so on. I’ll get into details later.

Amazing results. That’s what I’m really after. That’s the real Why of direct magick for me as an adult mage. Building techniques that produce results on par with modern science. I’ll talk more about what that means, and the difference between being amazed by an unexpected result vs producing genuinely amazing results, later in this series.

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

If you want readers to act, instead of just read, you need to start with why you do what you do.

I’ve been thinking through the “why” of direct magick.

It started with this TED talk from Simon Sinek:

If you don’t have time to watch, here’s the summary: Most people fail to inspire action because they start with what they do (a list of products), then they how they do it (what makes their products different). That’s certainly what I’ve been doing, focusing on techniques like energy healing and the general idea of doing magick consciously.

But people who inspire action start with why. Apple’s is “Think different.” Martin Luther King’s was “When man’s laws conflict with God’s laws, man’s laws must change.” And once listeners buy into the Why, they’re motivated to act on the How and the What.

(But really, watch the video, it’s a great talk).

I’m no Steve Jobs, and I’m certainly no MLK. But it’s gotten me asking: “Why direct magick?” I’ll post my thoughts as I develop them over the next few days.