Magick of Thought

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Replying to A Beginner’s Guide to Talking to Spirits, Sam asks:

How do you connect to the spirit to begin with? Or does the spirit connect to you to start?

Good question. I’ll have a few tips for you, but first, let’s talk about why you’re contacting the spirit.

Why Meet Spirits

Talking to spirits is like talking to people. (And like many mages, I include sentient spirits in “people.”) Ideally, you have something interesting to say, or something you want to ask them.

As a beginner, you’re probably interested in contacting spirits just to see what it’s like. For curiosity — and I’m all in favor of curiosity. So, this guide will assume you don’t have any particular goal for a particular spirit, and you just want to see what it’s like.

How I Started Talking to Spirits

I started talking to spirits in my teens.

Well, maybe that’s not quite accurate. I thought I started talking to spirits in my teens, but many conversations I thought were with spirits probably weren’t. For example, I’d picked up ideas about trees having spirits from some new age book, and would connect to trees, absorb their energy, and let thoughts enter my mind. I believed the thoughts came from a spirit in the tree, but years later, I returned to this found that the thoughts were my own, and that absorbing the tree’s energy had given my own thoughts a different feel in my mind. This is one of the reasons I focused so much on determining if the thoughts are internal or external in my previous post.

It wasn’t until my 20s, a decade into exploring magick, that spirits started wanting to work with me. I can’t be sure, but my guess is I was doing something interesting with some ethereal software, the spirits that owned that ethereal software saw, and they told the software to alert them when I was ready to talk to them. It happened when I was doing magick and thinking about spirits — the software must have picked up on those thoughts and decided that was a good time. I asked the spirits about the software, and would return to them periodically with more questions.

(This has happened several times over the course of my magick practice. It seems that, if you’re connected to ethereal software, thinking about the right things can trigger it to have spirits contact you.)

In my late 20s and 30s, spirits started contacting me, wanting to compare notes on techniques and otherwise work with me. That’s when I started working with spirits more, and started really thinking of them as people. These days, I talk with spirits almost every day, sometimes just to socialize and ask how they’re doing.

But this is a beginner post, so let’s get back to the basics. Here are a few options for contacting spirits as a beginner:

Option 1: Contact Ethereal Software Instead

Talking with ethereal software uses the same techniques as talking to spirits. All the tips from the beginner’s guide apply equally to ethereal software, and as a beginner, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between software and a spirit.

So, contact some ethereal software. If you don’t know how, just use the software for my book. Get used to the communication. This will (1) satisfy your curiosity, at least somewhat, and (2) give you experience communicating so it’s easier for spirits to talk to you later.

Option 2: Perform Standard Rituals

If you want to accomplish something hundreds of mages have done for hundreds of years, use the standard rituals. Work with a group in your area, do some Enochian or other ritual magick centered around spirits, and talk with those spirits. You’ll probably wind up with ethereal software rather than the actual spirits running the software, but the software will project visions of spirits into your mind, which is pretty awesome too.

Option 3: Ask for the Owners

What if you’ve already talked with ethereal software, and you really want to talk to a spirit, just to see how it’s different? You can do that, too. Contact your ethereal software and say, “I’d like to speak to the spirits that own you. Can you connect me to them, or ask them to connect to me?” (Don’t say it out loud. Communicate that message to the software.) It usually works — the spirits can, of course, disable that feature of the software, but they usually leave it turned on for someone who uses the software regularly, or someone initiated into that style. And since you’ve been working with the software for a while (right?), learning how it works and learning to communicate, you’ll be one of those regular / initiated users.

Make sure to have something interesting to talk about. Questions about the software, for example. Treat this like emailing an author — we’re happy to hear from you, but if you say, “Hi, I’ve never written an author before, and I just wanted to see if it worked,” we probably won’t be very interested.

Safety Note

These methods should put you in touch with friendly spirits, but connecting to something / someone new makes you more obvious to everyone, increasing your chances of being noticed by malicious spirits who want to drain your energy. So, I’d recommend reading some posts on protection, and reviewing them if you feel particularly exhausted, or have a headache or nausea after talking to spirits.

(Symptoms might happen immediately, or it might be the next day — sometimes, a slow energy drain doesn’t have symptoms for a while. Also, don’t let this safety note scare you off, we’re talking about the same level of badness as a cold or a hangover.)

Got more questions? Leave a comment.