Posts Tagged ‘Aura’

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Explaining Biofields to Skeptics

Sunday, October 18th, 2015

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George asks:

Question: What language would you use to describe to someone what a “biofield” is and how you work with it, if they weren’t well-versed in the topic (or even a little wary or dismissive about these things)?

(Also a great discussion of direct / indirect magick in that thread, worth reading from the start.)

To answer, I’ll imagine a potential client, curious but skeptical, is asking this. I’d start with case studies:

“Before explaining the biofield, let me explain why I care about it, why I work with it…” And then whatever case studies matter most, simply describing that person’s condition before the healing session and after.

Note: I like to let people draw their own conclusions on whether the results were from healing energy or placebo or coincidence. That way they don’t feel pressured. Also, it lets me avoid claiming more than I actually know, and also avoid legal issues with saying that a healing technique had specific medical results.

Why start with healing results? Because you can’t convince someone of the biofield by describing it. You need to start with the experimental evidence. You also want to share the impact, why it’s worthwhile to study and use this. For us, the experimental evidence and the impact are both our healing results.

(If they’re more skeptical, I’ll discuss peer-reviewed journal articles, particularly the recent studies done on cell cultures. It won’t convince an unreasonable skeptic, but if they want to believe and just need to know they’re not foolish for believing, journal articles can be great.)

Once they’re on board with this healing technique being awesome, I’d explain the biofield:

“The short answer is, no one really knows what the biofield is. It’s our current best explanation for how this phenomenon works. Our current thinking is, there’s there’s a field of energy around living tissue, probably emitted by the cells. By influencing the energy, we can affect the cells. Now, is this literally true, or is it just an explanation that happens to lead to useful healing techniques? I can’t say. But it’s our current best model.

“My current hypothesis is that the energy inhibits or promotes cellular processes, and by picking the right energy we can target the right cellular process. Healing techniques based on that model seem to work well. Is that literally true? Again, no one knows. At some point I’d like to do cell culture studies so we can advance our understanding further.”

The point is to be really honest about what we know and what we don’t, what we believe and why we believe it.

I continue that tone as we talk about their healing session, setting expectations that the first technique rarely works and that we’ll need to debug it. And clients tell me how other healers overpromise and underdeliver, and that they trust me more for admitting the limits of our knowledge and our current healing research.

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Healing Aura, Healing Touch (My Work Nov 22 – Dec 12)

Sunday, December 14th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Have you ever shaken hands with a healer and just known they had good energy? This week, I began learning to turn on that good-healing-energy feeling at will.

Also, since my last update three weeks ago, I finished creating the new ethereal muscle. It works, but not well enough. Details below.

Feeling Like a Healer

I want my touch to feel healing and positive. Not all the time, but anytime I choose. Three reasons:

  • I’m seeing my dying friend later this week. I’d like to relieve whatever suffering I can.
  • I’m attending Pantheacon next year, and want to practice energy healing and refine my techniques. If my handshake feels positive, I’ll probably have more takers.
  • Efficiently delivering an energy signature via my aura seems like a component of other useful techniques, and this is an excuse to learn it.

Developing the Technique

Based on testing a few years ago, I know that building energy in the right signature gives your touch that reassuring feeling of a healer. You build the energy, release it, the other person feels it, they’re reassured.

(Note: I only tested with myself and a friend sensitive to energy. It probably doesn’t work with people who don’t feel energy.)

I don’t have words for different types of energy, so I don’t recall exactly what signature I used back then. But I thought about how I wanted to feel: A balanced, full, wholeness to my energy, and I let my unconscious handle the details. Easy enough.

But building the energy is only half the technique. The other half is delivering it, and that involves something I noticed a few weeks ago with erotic energy:

When I think about my aura, and place energy in it, I get a small result. But when I feel my aura before engaging the energy, I get a bigger result, in both myself and my partner.

What does it mean to “feel my aura”? Technically, it means engaging the sensory connections I’ve placed throughout my aura. Practically, it means feeling my aura’s current signature throughout my body.

Remember the post about imagining moving my arm vs actually reaching out? That’s what’s going on here. Thinking about my aura is like imagining my arm moving. It tells my ethereal muscles that I’d like to engage my aura, but doesn’t give them any specifics. But engaging my aura is like engaging my arm muscles, and by consciously guiding my ethereal muscles through the process of engaging my entire aura, I get a bigger result when I want to change its energy.

So, the full technique: Engage my entire aura, from my energy reservoir on out. Think about a full, healing energy, and shift my aura to that energy. As I release that energy, my ethereal muscles will unconsciously build more, using the [L]techniques from earlier this year.

A Useful Side-Effect

I’ve been consulting in Kansas this week, so I haven’t had a chance to test how the energy feels. But I did find an unexpected side-effect: Shifting to a healing aura also energizes me.

On Tuesday, I got exhausted around 4pm. A combination of complex work and jetlag-induced insomnia had me unable to focus, with a working memory so small I couldn’t hold a paragraph-long answer in my head. I could still help the client, but not with anything complicated.

I’d been practicing my healing aura since Sunday. And practicing while tired seemed like a good way to build stamina. So, during a brief downtime, I set my aura to a healing signature, not expecting any useful results, just to strengthen my ethereal muscles.

In less than a minute, I felt better. Less tired. Able to juggle ideas again. I kept my healing aura engaged for around 10 minutes, and the better focus lasted in full force for that whole time. Even after I stopped engaging my aura, I still felt much better, able to do work I couldn’t have done before engaging my aura. A surprising, pleasant, useful result.

(Why does the surprise matter? Placebos don’t surprise us. They create exactly what we expect. When we get something unexpected, that indicates that we’re working with something real, and not just our expectations.)

I used it Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, too, with similar results.

A New Ethereal Muscle

My last weekly update, three weeks ago, discussed creating new ethereal muscles.

Background: Ethereal muscles are the parts of the mind that do magick. They’re not parts of the brain, but rather ethereal structures that connect to the brain. It’s analogous to a cyborg with computer chips connected to their brain, enhancing their thinking capabilities and letting them interact with computers and robots in distant locations.

In the past, I’ve only awakened ethereal muscles I already had, or that spirits had made for me. In the past few weeks, I created a new muscle.

The Technique

The broad strokes are simple enough: Break the task down into steps. Find ethereal muscles that can do each step. Copy them. Hook them up, tell them what to do in this new process, then hook the whole thing up to the rest of your ethereal muscles.

I wanted the new ethereal muscle to keep track of the signatures of my whole body, or the whole body of someone I was working with. Then, instead of keeping track of all those signatures with my brain, I’d have a dedicated ethereal muscle to do it, so I could do work even while tired, and so I could devote my focus to other tasks like more complex healing techniques.

So, break it down into steps: One component to recognize and store signatures (Part 1), and another to store locations (Part 2). Then, when I sense a signature, the new muscle will store the signature and location information, and build up a map of signatures.

In more detail: When doing sensory connections while engaging this new muscle, all signatures go into the new muscle. It stores them (part 1), with location / adjacency information (part 2) to record which signatures are next to which signatures. That’s a map I can recall without having to re-sample the sensory info. Then I need something to let my brain (or other ethereal muscles) request / traverse that info (which probably involves querying part 2).

Copying the ethereal muscles was easy enough. Programming them was surprisingly easy, too — they seem to understand my thoughts, and didn’t require any special programming language. This only took a few hours, spread over several days.

Results

But figuring out the program is hard. And this one doesn’t work right.

The new muscle is somewhat useful. I can look around an aura, then disconnect, then use the new muscle to recall signatures. I can’t be sure that I’m not just remembering the signatures normally with my brain, but I can recall more details with less focus, so we’ll go with that for now.

But I’d wanted to get a big picture of the aura as I was working with it, and that definitely isn’t happening. I mean, I can still build that picture with my brain’s working memory, but that only happens if I focus. If I relax my brain and engage the new ethereal muscle, I don’t get a big picture.

So, a good experience on the whole. I learned how to create new ethereal muscles, and I learned that the programming is the hard part. I also learned that my experience programming computers will probably help with this, long-term.

But for now, I’m going to put this on the back burner and focus on techniques with my aura, on creating sensations with energy, and on better communication techniques for better manifesting.

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Brain Aura (My Work November 8-14)

Friday, November 14th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Last week, I set up my aura so I could feel it more easily. This week, I did the same for my brain’s aura, then used it to improve my communication with spirits and ethereal software.

Setting Up My Brain’s Aura

Last week, I embedded sensory connections into my aura. It lets me feel what my aura is connected to, how open or closed my aura gate is, and what energy signature the various parts of my aura are in.

And I got an idea: What if I embed sensory connections in other structures? Would I gain the same awareness?

I tried embedding connections in my ethereal muscles, but they refused. They’re too intricate and might be damaged.

But they said yes to brain aura. Just like last week, I simply asked my ethereal muscles to embed the sensory connections, and they handled the rest. I just focused on my consulting job and let my ethereal muscles do their thing. It took two days.

Looking around, my brain’s aura is vast. Several times larger than my body’s. I doubt I’m unique in that.

And, broadly, I wonder if creating these sensory connections is part of learning any skill. That is, if I’d simply practiced for years, would I have similar sensory connections embedded in my aura? Is this a unique setup, or just a short cut? Something to look into later.

Note: Remember thinking mind? Important ethereal structure, horrible name. I’ve renamed it “brain aura.” This section is all about embedding sensory connections in thinking mind.

Finer Communication

Here’s what I’d planned to do with those sensory connections in brain aura: Throughout the day, as I do and feel different things, I’d notice the signatures, build up a library of signatures I recognize. Later, I could use that to identify and influence mental states in myself and others. (Remember, healing = influence for good.)

I’ll get to that eventually. But I got sidetracked with communication.

Communication works by reading and writing my brain’s aura. And communication muscles very much wanted to use my sensory connections to do that reading.

So I engaged the muscles that handle sensory connections, had them work with communication, let that run for a day. That first attempt turned out bad — the signatures were precise, and everything else felt too large, mushy, even damaging to the sensory connections. So I updated some settings and ran it for another two days.

It finished on Thursday. Communication is working again, feels much better, finer, more precise. I’ll see how it affects my results. It feels promising.

Closing Thoughts

A week ago, I found that aura isn’t practical for a lot of techniques. I wasn’t sure if the time I’d spent on it was worthwhile. A few wrong turns are the unavoidable cost of doing anything new, I told myself.

But exploring aura lead to these sensory connections in my brain. Which lead to better communication. Which is rather useful.

This is why I describe my work as exploring magick, rather than learning it. Because it’s not a linear path. If I’d set out to improve communication, I never would have said, “Let’s learn to feel my body’s aura better.” But it turns out, that’s where I needed to go.

Magick isn’t a straight path.

Also, this setup lets my ethereal muscles interact with my body more precisely. With these sensory connections, I’m able to feel more than I could before. If I’d just intended to feel my body, but not guided my ethereal muscles to create these sensory connections, it wouldn’t work nearly as well.

This setup is one of the tools I use for magick, above and beyond intent, and I want to highlight that for anyone who sees magick as just about intent. You can do even more if you add some more tools.

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Sensing My Aura (My Work November 1-7)

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

This week, I learned to extend my aura, embedded sensory connections in my aura so I can feel what it touches, and found that aura is impractical for long-distance energy healing.

Extending Aura

Last week I asked, “What’s special about aura that makes it better at sending energy than ordinary connections?”

The answer, it seems, is that one aura-type connection is made of lots of ordinary connections. The best visual is a dozen connections, laid next to one another, bound together into a flat sheet, then wrapped up into a spiral, like a barbershop pole. It’s orderly, and dense — the spiral means the ordinary connections are at an angle, and one inch of the aura-type connection involves several inches of each ordinary connection. Which means there’s a ton of ethereal structure there, which can hold a lot of energy.

(Of course, I don’t know if it actually looks like that. It probably doesn’t. But hopefully that gets you thinking in the same direction I am.)

I should mention, I don’t know if that visualization is useful on its own. It’s a way to express what I felt when I used sensory connections to feel my own aura, the density and weight of that structure. The visualization refers to that feeling, it communicates my intent to my ethereal muscles, but if they hadn’t directly felt my aura, I don’t know that they’d know what to do with the visualization.

I spent a couple bus rides extending aura-like connections over distance. It took focus at first, but it’s pretty easy now. It still isn’t fast, though.

Also, I noticed I couldn’t feel what those aura-like connection was touching, so I added a sensory connection to it. That lets me guide these dense connections to the right structures to work with. (I visualize the sensory connection going through the middle of the spiral, though again, I doubt that’s what actually happens.)

Sensing Aura

After learning to make sensory connections inside new aura-like connections, I also extended sensory connections throughout my existing aura. This has made me more aware of my own energy, of its signature as I go through the day, and also of what I’m connected to. The idea is to target specific ethereal structures with my aura, like a partner’s inner aura and the paths to their mind.

I also extended sensory connections throughout my aura gate, making me aware of how open it is, and letting me close or open it more thoroughly. Useful for shielding (close it) and for sending and receiving energy (open it).

I haven’t done formal testing yet, but a promising preliminary result: I’d closed the gate, then forgotten about it until I was making love with an energy-sensitive partner. Without telling her, and without changing anything else, I opened the gate. She responded quite strongly. So, it seems like controlling aura gate is an effective way to control the flow of energy. Also, this confirms I’m actually moving ethereal structures, rather than just imagining it all.

Aura for Healing

A friend asked me to “send loving energy.” Yes, I know she just wants me to wish her well. But being the literalist I am, I wondered about actually doing it.

If I were in person, I’d think about loving her, build that energy in my body, and open my aura gate. At distance, what if I create aura-like connections to her, then put the energy on that connection? That should work better than just making ordinary connections, which tend to transmit only a small amount of energy.

Building the aura-like connection took about 10 minutes. Slow, but not difficult. Then I sent energy. But remember how we said that these dense connections can hold a lot of energy? That means they need to be charged first. That took a minute, and was fairly tiring. Then I kept the energy flowing, but felt much less energy reach her than I expected. After 5 minutes of sending, I was exhausted and had a headache, and had to stop. I asked her later, and she hadn’t felt much of anything.

I’d asked about this sort of technique earlier this year. My trainers said it was impractical, too inefficient to be worth doing. And you know what? They’re right. (They’ve also shown me techniques that should work over distances, which I’ll try next time.)

It’s said that Edison invented the light bulb by trying 1,000 versions that didn’t work. I’m choosing to interpret this finding as part of that process.

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Creating Time for Magick (My Work Oct 25-31)

Friday, October 31st, 2014

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Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Priorities aren’t about what we do. They’re about what we cut.

This was my first week at my new job. Last weekend, I helped a dear friend teach a class. Zero days off.

I can’t just say, “Magick is important.” I have to say what I won’t do to make time for magick.

Evenings are about seeing people I love. I’ve seen someone important to me each evening this week, and I’m seeing several of them tonight. I’m not willing to cut that. But I get home at 6, and if I choose to work instead of relax, I can get an hour in before dinner. Like I’m doing tonight, to finish this post.

I can also do an hour on the bus. Half an hour in the morning, doing magick practice. Tonight, half an hour in the evening, doing the first draft of this post. I’d rather read, but if I don’t do this now, it won’t get done.

I’m also learning to track my food. If I don’t have a snack at 6, I don’t have the focus to work, but I have plenty of focus for games. Not good…

So, prioritizing magick is about cutting leisure time during my fully-awake hours. It’s not something I can add to my day at 10pm. It’s something I do instead of relaxing at 5pm. And if I’m honest, this is creating good habits for when I’m doing magick full time again.

Let’s talk magick studies. Here’s what I’ve done this week:

Aura

I’m getting decent results just dumping energy into my outer aura. But I’ll get better results if I target specific parts of the recipient’s ethereal body. (Inner aura and paths to mind, specifically.)

This week, I confirmed that hunch with a trainer, then practiced connecting to people on the bus. Didn’t do any effects, just learned to connect properly. The problem is, I can’t precisely feel where my aura is going, what it’s connecting to. I can do that with sensory connections, but not with my aura. The solution: Make normal connections, find the ethereal structures you want to target, then let my aura follow those normal connections like a trail of breadcrumbs.

Also, what’s special about aura that makes it so much better at transmitting energy than a normal connection? If I understand that, I could potentially make aura-like connections at distance, make them more precisely, or make connections that are even better than aura at delivering energy. The key seems to be connection density: Each bit of aura is made of tons of connections, all reinforcing each other.

(I’ve had some success extending connections like this, but haven’t yet done anything more than connect to people and verify that it feels right from my end.)

Communication

I also finished learning level 6 communication. Nothing unexpected here, just put in the practice to get reasonably proficient.

Fiction Recommendation

I’m reading during downtime at work. Through the author notes on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which you should definitely read), I found a fiction about magick as a branch of physics, explored as a science. Thoroughly enjoying it.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Aura, Erotic Energy, and Advanced Communication (My Work October 18-24)

Saturday, October 25th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

This week, I had great results using outer aura for erotic energy. I also trained in some more advanced communication techniques.

Outer Aura and Erotic Energy

Last week, we talked about three layers of aura. I’m now calling them:

  • Inner aura: Where aura connects to the body and mind.
  • Aura gate: A set of paths you can open or close. Important for shielding.
  • Outer aura: Delivers the energy to the person you’re working with. I think it goes out a few feet, though I haven’t gotten around to testing that yet.

This week, I compared two techniques for erotic energy with a partner:

  1. Build energy in my body, open the aura gate, touch my partner.
  2. The same, but send the energy into outer aura.

#2 (using outer aura) was clearly, obviously better. No contest.

I’m excited by the improvement, and by how easy it is. (This isn’t something I’m deeply exploring, it’s just stuff I’m trying when I’m doing erotic energy with a partner.)

Next, I’m going to look into connecting outer aura to different parts of the body, and different ethereal structures within them.

Advanced Communication

The spirits I work with have set tracks to learn various skills. We talked about this before with fundamental skills for effects. Each level does the same thing, just more precisely / quickly / powerfully.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been learning communication. So let’s review communication:

  • The sender thinks a message. The energy around their brain takes on signatures matching that message.
  • Optionally, the sender holds those signatures steady, preserving the old signature as they think the next concept.
  • Either sender or receiver packages those signatures, to make them stable and transportable.
  • Either party shifts the signature of the message from the sender’s signature to the receiver’s signature. (Sometimes, this is done in two steps: Sender shifts to neutral, and receiver shifts to their signature.)
  • Either party unpackages the message and places it into the receiver’s thinking mind. (Thinking mind = Aura of their brain, more or less.)
  • Either party moves those signatures from the receiver’s thinking mind into their brain.

Each level I’ve learned with communication has me doing one more step:

Level 1: Quiet your mind and build energy. (Details in Initiation into Direct Magick.)

Level 2: When sending, hold the signatures steady. When receiving, move signatures from thinking mind to brain. (This was a fairly big improvement. It made it easier for spirits to talk with me, and they started giving me more direct answers.)

Level 3: Package your message, and unpack theirs. (Their message will already be shifted to your signature.)

Level 4: After packaging the message, shift its signature to a neutral signature. When receiving, shift the signature from neutral to your own. This lets you communicate with someone who also knows Level 4 communication. (This is also a fairly big improvement. It let me communicate the way spirits do, and they started responding to me as a peer.)

Level 5: To send, shift the message into their signature. To receive, shift from their signature to yours. Now, you can communicate with someone who knows Level 3 communication.

Level 6 (what I’m learning): Make connections throughout their mind. When they send, package the signatures that their mind makes. When you send, unpack the message, and place the signatures into their thinking mind. (This lets you communicate with someone who knows Level 2 communication.)

Notice the pattern: The more you learn, the less your partner needs to. So Level 7 probably lets you communicate with someone simply quieting their mind.

(Most tracks have 8 levels. I’m not sure what Level 8 is, but often that last level uses the other skills in a more efficient way.)

Right now, I’m learning Level 6. It isn’t particularly useful. All the spirits I talk to can do at least Level 4 communication. Most psychics and channelers simply quiet their mind, so I’d need level 7 communication to talk with them, and I’d need even more skill for laymen. So, learning Level 6 doesn’t let me communicate with anyone new

Even my teacher told me that Level 6 isn’t useful. But it’s part of learning Levels 7 and 8. It’s worthwhile to learn how to connect to someone’s thinking mind, and that will probably improve how I place messages into my own mind. So, I’m not learning this because Level 6 is awesome. I’m learning it to develop the building blocks of a better technique. Which is something I do rather often, actually.

New Job

I also started work this week. Good job, I’m happy. Less time for writing and magick studies, though. Not anything profound here, just a note that, for the next year, my weekly updates may be sparser.

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Erotic Energy and Easy Communication (My Work October 6-17)

Sunday, October 19th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Three developments in the past two weeks: Useful techniques for erotic energy, an easy improvement to my communication, and (sadly) a one-year relationship coming to an end.

Erotic Energy

Remember last month when I updated my energy meditation? That made it easy to build and move energy while I’m distracted. Well, it’s continuing to work well.

A few notes:

I can produce different types of energy by focusing on different things. Thinking about arousal vs love vs supporting someone all produce different energies that feel different to the receiver. If you want to try, just bring that emotion into your focus as you build your energy.

Previously, I’d sent energy by moving it to my aura. But if I just think about sending energy to my partner, I notice that my aura opens. It seems there are paths in my aura that are normally closed, which open when I think about sending energy.

(Why are they closed? Probably for my shielding. I’ll connect to some other mages this week and see if their aura paths are closed, too.)

Once my aura is open and I have energy inside my body, I can just touch the person. That’s all it takes to send energy. So, touching their head, chest, genitals, wherever, it becomes easy to send energy.

From looking at my own aura, it seems like there are three parts:

  • Where aura connects to my body. A few months ago, when I was exploring [L]how aura connects to nerves and my mind, I was exploring this layer of aura.
  • The part that opens and closes, to either shield me or let energy out. That’s what I’ve been working with for the past few weeks.
  • A part that goes out several feet. I’m not sure what to do with this part, though, or even certain it extends the way I think it does. I’ll be working with this coming up.

So, a bunch of new results with aura that will hopefully lead to new techniques soon.

Easy Communication

The next chapter of my book is about communicating with ethereal software. (Will be posted Monday.) To write it, I got training in beginner communication techniques. And as some of you have pointed out before, communication is easier if you build energy first.

(Feel free to crow in the comments.)

I’d doubted that in the past. It just seemed like more energy would mean more noise, making it harder to read the subtle changes in energy that happen as the person thinks the message. But it turns out, the right energy amplifies the signal.

What’s the right energy? A moderate amount, with a stable signature, matching the normal signature of your head. Anything else actually makes it harder to read the message.

Why does this help? I think that, without the energy, all the ethereal structures around the brain are a little hungry and absorb some of the signal. But with the energy, those structures are full, so the full signal is available to be read. Just a guess, though.

And holding energy doesn’t just help with beginner communication. I’ve been using it for all my communication, and everything is a little easier. Simplest improvement I’ve had in a while.

Relationship Ending

More of a personal note than a magick note, but sadly, a relationship ended recently. As sometimes happens in polyamory, two awesome people simply couldn’t find a relationship dynamic that worked for both of them. Nobody’s fault, and we’re still close friends, but there’s also been a lot of sadness on both sides. That’s why I skipped last week’s update, and why book progress has been slow.

But life goes on. A couple weeks later, I’m feeling much more together, back to learning magick, and back to writing.

New Job

And one more note: I have a one-year computer consulting job starting this week. It’s local (daily commute), interesting work I’ll be good at, and I’m pretty excited. I’m committed to keeping this blog going, though — expect me to continue posting random thoughts every Wednesday and a weekly update every Friday / weekend, and expect Monday chapter postings to happen at least once a month.

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First Success: Sensations in a Non-Mage (My Work April 19-25)

Friday, April 25th, 2014

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

Mages feel energy, but non-mages don’t. Understanding the cause should lead to insights in how energy interacts with nerves and the brain, and ultimately lead to better healing techniques. So I’m working on a technique to produce sensations in non-mages.

This week, I  the start of that technique. But first, I need to back up, and share some work I’ve left out of other “My Work This Week” reports.

A few weeks ago, I asked the spirits I work with for an expert in humans, then asked him, “Tell me about aura and using it to create sensations.”

He didn’t have an answer for sensations. But I got some good background information, plus one valuable insight:

  • If you place healing energy in someone’s energy layer, the healing result is weak. If you follow the paths from energy to cells, and place the healing energy closer to cells, the healing result is stronger. Imagine it like massaging someone through a winter coat vs massaging their skin. Closer to cells = Larger effect.
  • With sensations, the opposite is true: Energy placed in the aura produces sensations, but energy close to cells does not. It’s like the massage doesn’t work if you’re touching their skin. I’d noticed this too, and just said, “Huh, sensations are different.”
  • Insight: The spirit pointed out, the only reason this would happen is if energy in the aura went to more than one place.

At this point, the coat analogy breaks down, and I just have to explain the details. If the energy your the aura only goes to the nerves in your body, as I believed it did, then getting closer to nerves would produce a larger effect. But if there are two sets of paths going from your aura to your body, then going closer to nerves means you affect nerves more, but you miss the other path. If the other path is important, then missing it would cause the person to not feel sensations. Which is exactly what happens.

Using techniques for sensory connections, I found the other paths. They go to the brain. So, if you place energy in the aura of someone’s arm, that energy goes both to their arm, and to their brain.

(Like many steps in this project, the sensory techniques to find those paths could be a whole series.)

We did some testing. We created a sensation, then blocked the paths from my aura to my brain. The sensation stopped. We un-blocked the paths, and the sensation started again. Clearly, the path to the brain is what matters for sensations.

We looked at these paths in non-mages. They were atrophied, with gaps along the way. Think of a chain of dominoes, stood up and ready to topple, except some of them are missing or spaced too far apart. Is that the reason non-mages don’t feel sensations? No way to know. But it’s certainly sufficient.

How do we produce sensations given these problems? The spirit suggested a technique: Warm up those pathways from aura to brain by sending them energy directly. We place a little energy in their aura, follow where it goes, and place additional energy there. Follow that new energy, place additional energy wherever it goes, and repeat, all the way down to brain. Think of this like filling in the gaps between dominoes.

Once those paths are warmed up, we can send energy to the person’s aura, just like we do with mages. Since the connections are already full of energy, any additional energy will flow right through them, into the person’s brain. Hopefully, this will produce sensations.

(Why bother with aura at all? Why not just produce the sensations by overwhelming the pathways close to their brain? Because getting these paths to a basic level of energy is simple, but activating the sensation is complex. It’s important that the sensation follows the right paths. Placing energy in the aura does this automatically. If we went closer to brain, we’d have to figure out which paths to affect.)

We tested this with the same friend from last week who didn’t feel energy. First, as a control, we tested without this technique. She again didn’t feel energy.

Then we charged up the paths from her aura to her brain, put energy in her aura, and she felt an itch in her forehead. We blocked the paths, and the itch reduced. I made a point of asking a generic, “What do you feel now?” to keep from suggesting experiences to her.

When we unblocked those paths, and before I even asked what she felt, she said that the itch had returned. I asked the spirit, “Do it again,” meaning to block the sensation again. He misunderstood, and repeated the whole sensation technique, which intensified the itch to unpleasant levels. I asked him to shut it down, and the itching stopped. It would be nicer if each sensation had matched my command, but on the whole, I’ll call that a successful first run.

I’m pretty excited. Before, we had a list of skills that ought to lead to a technique. Now, we have a technique. I still want to test it with more people, learn to do the technique myself (without the spirit), and refine the type of energy we use — I want to create more than just itchy foreheads, after all. But this is a big step toward that solution.

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Can We Feel Auras? (My Work April 12-18)

Friday, April 18th, 2014

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This month, I’m figuring out how to make energy that non-mages can feel. And a good early step is to get a baseline: How effective is the basic obvious technique?

This week, two friends helped me test whether we could feel auras while almost touching. Short story is: Experienced mages can, non-mages can’t. No surprise, but I’m glad to know. Plus I got some helpful data.

Mages Feel Auras

My first helper had been working with energy for a decade. We’ll call her a mage.

Our test was simple: The receiver stands, blindfolded. The sender silently moves their hand close to various parts of the receiver’s body. The receiver says what they feel. Afterward, we compare hand location to sensations.

As the receiver, my sensations mapped closely to her hand position. At one point, I said that I felt her hand in front of my chest, and then heard her cough to my left. I said, “I guess I was wrong there, huh?” She said, “No, I was wondering if you were maybe hearing breathing or footsteps, so I stood to your side but held my hand near your chest.” Which means I was (correctly) feeling the aura of her hand near my chest, and not hearing her and feeling her via proprioception.

Then I became the sender. I had three phases. First, control: I did absolutely nothing with energy or aura, and just moved my hands around. She felt nothing. Success. (I didn’t tell her what I was doing, and lead her to believe I would be testing techniques.)

Second, I engaged my aura. Using the ethereal muscles for working with aura, I thought about making my aura firmer, then moved my hand around. She felt it, and accurately said where my hand was. Success.

Third, I over-engaged my aura. This wasn’t intentional, but after a minute or so, she started to get a headache, and felt sensations coming from wherever I was standing, rather than from my hand.

If we hadn’t had her successful 2nd round, or my successful tests as receiver, I’d say this was just a failed test, that she’s hearing breathing and anticipating sensations. But with those successes, I think this was a matter of me engaging my entire aura, rather than just my hand. I think she felt the aura from my torso, and that my aura built up in some way. I’ll look into that soon, improve my control, then test again.

Summary: Experienced mages feel auras, as long as the sender engages their aura. But there’s a little complexity in engaging your aura correctly.

Non-Mages Don’t Feel Auras

My second helper is open-minded, has an altar to crystals and has felt sensations during energy meditations, but doesn’t practice much herself. We’ll call her a non-mage, though more into this stuff than your average person on the street.

This time, I only acted as sender. Our procedure was roughly the same. And for all the techniques — doing nothing, engaging aura, and actively building energy — she felt nothing.

That’s not surprising — if it really was easy to produce sensations, we would have demonstrated energy to the masses long ago.

But beyond that, this is a very good sign. Why? Because if she was feeling air movements from my hands, or hearing my footfalls, or some other non-magickal cause, she would have reported sensations. She didn’t. Which suggests that we’re not picking up those errors in these tests. Which matters more than any one technique producing sensations.

Also, I’ve been needing an open-minded assistant who doesn’t feel energy, and who won’t get annoyed when I can’t produce sensations in my first dozen attempts. And now I have that assistant.

(Also this week, I did some training in how aura connects to the mind and body. Will probably post about that next week.)

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Aura and Chakras (My Work April 5-11)

Friday, April 11th, 2014

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Last week took control of my training and found my aura. This week I explored aura and may have found chakras.

We’ve already discussed the difference between visualizing your aura vs reaching out to those structures. When you visualize, you imagine your aura, based on what you expect to see. But when you reach out, you can feel what’s actually there, and see where it doesn’t match your expectations.

Connecting to my aura, there’s one overall energy signature for my body, plus other signatures at various points. There’s one energy signature in my groin, another in my stomach, two in my chest (solar plexis and upper chest), one around my mouth, and a sixth starting at my forehead and going to the top of my head. Looking at two friends, I found the same six regions. One friend has a decade of energy working experience, and the other has an altar of crystals but little practical experience.

I’m going to tentatively call these chakras.

I’ve gone looking for chakras before, but found nothing. I wasn’t expecting to find them here. But sometimes, you have to look in the right spot. Before, I’d been looking at the default layer I use for energy healing, which corresponds to individual tissues — muscles, ligaments, nerves, and so on. So I figured people were just seeing what they expected to see, and moved on. It seems that you only get these large-scale energy patterns as you get farther away from cells.

(And a note to anyone interested in science: Doing science means being wrong. It’s an unintuitive sign you’re learning.)

I hesitate to call them chakras because I don’t mean, “Energy centers that have to be balanced, each with a corresponding color, and so on.” I can’t see why we’d care about balancing them, or what it would even mean for one to be open or closed. But I can imagine how this phenomenon plus a few hundred (thousand?) years of religion and ancient medicine would lead to the current beliefs about chakras.

Interestingly, I didn’t find any in the throat. Not in myself or either friend. I also know that different systems of chakras use a different number, and I’m curious if the throat chakra is often left out, or if it’s perhaps a more modern addition. Anyone know?

My other work this week was to strengthen the ethereal muscle for working with my aura. It was already awake, from work done in my 20s to find and awaken my ethereal muscles. But I engaged and strengthened it for a couple of days. Same as I did last month with the ethereal muscles for building and moving energy.

Next, I’ll train in auras. I assume there are some known techniques that are easy once you can work with aura, and I’d like to know how to do them.

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