Posts Tagged ‘Ascention’

Averaging in an Ascended Spirit

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

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They say you’re the average of your 5 closest friends. Who is “they”? Apparently 800 million webpages.

The idea is simple: You measure yourself against your friends. Hang out with depressed non-achievers and you’ll expect little of yourself. Hang out with confident successes and you’ll come to expect big things of yourself, too.

What if one of your closest friends was an ascended spirit? What if you spent time with them every day? What if, in addition to training, you also talking with them about your life, and about what excites them? I bet they’d have interesting ideas on relationships, love, job troubles, and even fashion and art.

How would that input change how you approach problems, change what you prioritize, and change the bars you set for yourself?

Just a thought.

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Why Enlightenment Improves Your Magick

Friday, August 10th, 2012

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Last week, I wrote:

The day after you ascend, nothing much changes, except that now you’re treated as an equal by other ascended. You don’t become magickally skilled because you ascended; instead, you ascended because you were magickally skilled. And, after ascending, you still have a human body, and no beam of light wisks you away.

Ananael replied:

According to the Golden Dawn and Thelemic magical schools […] there’s a big jump when transitioning to the state of consciousness represented by the sphere of Tiphareth (the Sun) on the Tree of Life and that represented by the sphere of Binah (Saturn). A magician who has accomplished the former is called an Adept, and one who has accomplished the latter is called a Master of the Temple.

[…]

The state of consciousness resulting from Adept-level work dramatically increased my ability to shift probabilities and so forth in the material world.

How do I square those two statements?

Ananael’s report doesn’t surprise me, actually. The apparent disagreement comes from focusing on different metrics.

I usually focus on the core skills of direct magick: How well can you make or follow a connection? How well can you match a signature? Can you set up an effective shield, and how good does someone have to be to bypass it without you noticing?

Those things do not change with enlightenment, in my experience, and I would not expect them to change with ascention.

But remember that ethereal software I’m offering with my book? Before releasing it, I thought about how to keep everyone safe — the mages using it, and the non-mages around them. My answer: It will require consciousness integration (or other enlightenment work) before it will allow you to access more advanced, powerful functionality. Your access level is limited not only by your technical skill at issuing commands, but by your enlightenment work.

Here’s how it works: Say you haven’t done any enlightenment work, and you make a request of the ethereal software. (For my software, requests are words, but other software could use rituals or visualizations as requests.) Some requests, such as asking it to significantly affect someone else’s body, will simply be ignored. Other requests, like dramatic changes from manifesting, will produce a weaker, safer version.

Once you do enlightenment work, some of those restrictions lift, and the software will respond to more commands more fully. The more enlightenment, the fewer restrictions.

So, that’s my best guess on the enlightenment-based upgrade that Ananael describes.

(Another possibility: Spirits could trigger mental muscles to awaken as a reward for reaching a certain level. This could be delivered through ethereal software, similar to my ethereal software’s command to awaken a few mental muscles to get you started. But I consider this option to be much less probable, because (1) it’s more difficult to do, (2) while theoretically possible, I have never seen this actually happen, and (3) there are prohibitions on awakening someone else’s mental muscles, beyond the first few required to get someone started. But it is possible, so I wanted to mention it.)

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Enlightenment: A Systematic Model

Saturday, August 4th, 2012

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The first step to good magick is building a good model.

The first model is usually a description: Enlightened people don’t act out of anger or pettiness. Useful for recognizing the thing you’re talking about, but if you try to build techniques based on a description, you’ll tend to focus on individual factors like anger, rather than solving the underlying problem.

To solve the problem, you have to build a systematic model: A description of the moving pieces that cause those behaviors. It involves a lot of observation and research, and it takes a lot of practice to become good at systematic models, but they’re the key to building good techniques.

Quick example: We can describe a car as, “four wheels, moves fast.” But to build or repair one, you need a systematic model of all the pieces that make up the engine.

And so, I’m quite excited to have a first systematic model for enlightenment. It comes from an ascended spirit I work with who’s trying to further his own enlightenment. Here’s how he put it:

An enlightened mind is one cohesive unit. All the parts are integrated, and synchronize with one another. As a result, the mind is fully internally consistent: There’s no part of it that holds a belief that contradicts the beliefs of another part.

In other words, no doublethink. He’s saying that an enlightened mind won’t accept doublethink because all the components communicate with one another, even the semi-conscious ones. Which immediately prompts us to investigate how to enable all the components to communicate with one another. (Hint: Revisit consciousness integration.)

(Of course, this is just one aspect. That’s how these models work: You explore one aspect of enlightenment, figure out how to add it to your own mind, then explore the next piece.)

I’ll cover the technique in tomorrow’s post. Don’t get too excited, though, it’s not easy to learn. But it might be useful for some of you.

For today, though, I want to close with two thoughts and a question:

  • First, how do I know this model is accurate? The answer is, it suggested a technique which works well, and which I wouldn’t have seen without this model. That’s how I validate pretty much all of my models.
  • Second, talking with this guy, it strikes me that “enlightened” is a matter of degrees. It’s not enlightened vs unenlightened, it’s more and less enlightened.
  • And my question: This concept of “a unified mind, incapable of holding contradictory beliefs,” is that common to other styles focused on enlightenment?
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Enlightenment and Ascention

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

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I never thought I’d write about ascention. Even now, writing this, I’m not sure if I’ll ever publish it. The topic has been taken over by new-agers, filled with ridiculous models based on wishes and self-important daydreams, without any real observations, techniques or models.

And yet, to properly discuss enlightenment, I have to discuss ascention. So please, bear with me, as this is my first time explaining this in writing.

First, why am I even talking about ascention? It’s not something I ever expected to be in my model, and I’ve always found the idea a bit silly. The standard depictions just never added up for me. But the spirits I work with use the term, and consider it quite important. And so, I’ve started using the term, too.

When I say “ascention,” I worry that I conjure up the image of a person disappearing into a beam of light and becoming some sort of spirit, which sounds entirely too Hollywood-special-effects-ish for me to take seriously. In my experience, magick just doesn’t work like that.

I think of ascention as more of a political designation. Like becoming a senator. You don’t change from human into something else, and you don’t suddenly gain more skills — to get elected, you had to have good oratory skills, a good understanding of human nature and politics and so on, and you keep those skills, but they don’t magically increase the day after the election. What does change, though, is how people respond to you.

It’s the same with ascention: You have to have good technical skills with magick, along with strong progress in enlightenment. The day after you ascend, nothing much changes, except that now you’re treated as an equal by other ascended. You don’t become magickally skilled because you ascended; instead, you ascended because you were magickally skilled. And, after ascending, you still have a human body, and no beam of light wisks you away.

Of all the areas of magick I study, I probably understand ascention the least. My model is based more on training than on personal experience, and there are parts that my trainers won’t explain until I’m further along. If you’re wondering, “Why bother calling this something as grandiose as ‘ascending,’ rather than just talking about collaborations and access,” it’s because I’ve adopted their term, and because it’s quite important to them.

One more item: Many people say that the spirits they work with are ascended. Perhaps some of their spirits even claim to be ascended themselves. In my experience, few are, based on the level of skill that I associated with ascended spirits. It’s not an argument I intend to have with individual mages, because it quickly devolves into a schoolyard “my dad can beat your dad up,” but it’s something I want to mention to you, my readers, as something to be aware of.

So, the enlightenment work I do is in service of this form of ascention. And I had to explain that for the rest of this series to make sense.

Also, a quick note to Ananael and Ona: Thanks for the great comments lately. They keep sparking thoughts that I’m pulling into this series. Will reply to them soon.

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