Magick of Thought

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On Monday, I negotiated a consulting rate with a client. (Computer consulting.) I’ve done it a dozen times or more, but this time, I had psychic information* to assist me. Today, I want to share what happened, and what I realized about the algorithms used by my psychic ethereal software.

*I’m calling it “psychic information” rather than “psychic intuitions” because I mostly notice the information. If you know a better term, please let me know.

Negotiating a Consulting Rate

Quick background: I’ve worked with this client for about 6 months. I’d quoted him a rate when I started working — call that rate X. Then people in his organization started asking me to do a lot more travel than I wanted. I said I’d do it if they paid a higher rate — call that rate X+2. They said yes, we booked some gigs.

Then on Monday, the head of that organization was filling out some paperwork and needed to fill in my rate. He called me, asked about the X+2 rate, said the parent company needed one rate for everything, and offered me an official rate between the two (X+1), with some logic behind his offer.

Psychic information said: Reject his offer, you can get X+2.

I ignored it. My gut feeling — my own, non-magickal intuition — said that I could get X+2, but insisting on it would make me seem unreasonable, and could damage my future bookings with these guys. And I can always bump my rate again in 6 months.

So I agreed to X+1. Which is still higher than the X rate I had planned on billing this year. But after the call I felt bad, like I had left money on the table.

I asked my psychic software why it recommended going for X+2. Was it based on a long-term strategy of maximizing my happiness / success over the next several years? Or was it based on a short-term view that maximizing money is usually good?

Answer: Short-term. The software knows that more money is generally better, and that I’d feel good after the call if I got more money, so it was guiding me in that direction.

Thirty seconds later, something really interesting happened: I got more psychic information, this time telling me that my gut intuition was right, that insisting on X+2 would damage my long-term success.

Why didn’t it guide me to long-term success in the first place? Because I was in the middle of a conversation. I didn’t have 30 seconds to wait for it to figure out the right long-term answer. I needed an immediate answer, which meant it needed a fast algorithm, which meant it could only consider short-term goals.

This is probably a general limitation of real-time psychic information. Which should help us know when to trust it, and when to trust our own logic.

Testing Psychic: Why Not Flip Coins?

There’s one thread hanging from last week’s posts: Why not just flip a coin, get psychic information about which way it landed, and do a statistically significant number of trials in an hour?

The answer is: I don’t have a data stream for that. Just like I don’t have a data stream that guides me to long-term success as I’m having a conversation. The data is somewhere out there, if only I had software with access to it and the right algorithm to feed it to me. But I don’t, so I can’t get to that information.

Eventually, I’ll look into making new data streams. But that’s not for quite a while.

Next on This Blog

I’m done talking about psychic information for a while. Coming up, I’ll discuss visualization vs conscious magick, summarize the Intent and Implementation series, and finish the grounding series. And post more book chapters.