Posts Tagged ‘Consciousness Integration’

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Why Starting a Magick Career is Terrifying

Sunday, April 29th, 2012

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Self-help types sometimes ask, “What would you do if you knew you’d be successful?” I’m not big on self-help, but sometimes they do have good questions.

Once we toss out things like, “Learn to manifest stock trades,” which is like picking “Play for the NBA” or “Get elected president,” I wind up with:

Stop the computer consulting and build an energy healing / teaching practice.

And, between moving to San Francisco, developing some good healing techniques, and getting a handle on how to teach direct magick, now seems like a good time.

And when I focus on just the next steps, it feels good. I’ll do healing sessions for friends for free to build the experience and referrals I’ll need for paid clients. I’ll teach event organizers in the pagan and magick communities 1-on-1, with the understanding that they’ll help me organize classes if they like what I’m doing. Those feel doable. And I ran some numbers, and I can pay my bills with about 3 clients per day every day, charging reasonable rates. (Including taxes and room rental.) It all feels pretty feasible and concrete.

But then I dial into the big picture: Leaving an established career with a good hourly rate for a woo-woo field. Trying to create genuinely amazing healing results, on the level of modern sciences, when so many others have tried and failed and been ridiculed out of their jobs. Actually taking steps to turn magick into a mature, respected field, instead of just saying I want to do that on my blog. Really, it’s all pretty terrifying.

I’ve already thought about the effects of failing. There’s a great exercise in [L amazon] The 4-Hour Workweek: Imagine what would happen if you fail, and how you’d recover. For me, I’d teach myself Ruby (a programming language), make some open-source projects, blog as I do it, and get a job as a programmer. It would probably take 3 months. So failing and having to go back to a normal job isn’t hard.

The terrifying part, I realize, is about being different. Being weird. Going against my tribe, where you’re supposed to get a degree, a sensible job and a house in the suburbs. It just feels like what I’m doing is Wrong, or only done by Dumb People, or in some other way thoroughly taboo. And I notice, this is the same feeling I had when I left my full-time consulting job in 2010.

Incidentally, leaving that full-time consulting job was a great decision. I became way happier, got tons more free time to blog and practice magick, and still earned more than I needed. Which is probably a good data point to keep in mind when considering how much to listen to this terrified feeling.

Now that I know what I’m dealing with, time to resolve it. Yes, just like that. Five years ago, I would have meditated, let my unconscious speak and tried to work through my feelings over a week. These days, I use consciousness integration* for about three minutes, and I feel so much better.

*Quick version of the consciousness integration technique I use: Activate thought paths between my conscious mind and the semi-conscious parts of my psyche that were worried; have them talk; and apply a calm, relaxed energy to those semi-conscious parts. There are simpler versions of the technique, too. I’ll be writing about this more as I write my book later this year.

So, what’s the point? Maybe it’s that you can be terrified for no good reason. Or that feeling terrified has very little to do with what will actually make you happy. Or that the first step to resolving it is admitting you’re scared and figuring out why.

Or maybe it’s whatever you take away from the story. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading.

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

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Posted in Personal Stories | 4 Comments »

Can Magick Hurt People?

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

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Yes. And we, as teachers, need to keep that in mind.

I’ve believed you can cause harm with magick for quite some time. But it’s only recently that I’ve seen how to do it, using only techniques I’ve already learned and verified.

Remember when I did the healing work for Lisa’s hives? To do it, I influenced her neurotransmitters and immune-signalling chemicals, to break the feedback cycles. (At least, that’s the intent — let’s assume it worked for this post.) Well, what happens if you use that same magick to put those chemicals out of balance? I have no idea, but it can’t be good. And I didn’t see that harmful technique until months later, meaning there are probably others I haven’t seen at all yet.

There’s no way to teach meaningful healing techniques without also teaching how to hurt people in an essentially-undetectable way. (The harm is obvious, but can’t be traced back to you.) This is one of the main reasons for my recent interest in enlightenment*, and techniques for a practitioner to trigger personal growth.

*By “enlightenment,” I simply mean “Acting from a mature place, and not harming someone for petty reasons.” I understand that Buddhists and other practitioners have a more technical meaning, so let’s use a capitalized Enlightenment for that technical meaning.

My answer for myself is consciousness integration, which I’ll write about more coming up. But it’s advanced magick, requiring you to activate new thought paths in your mind. By the time you can do that, you can already hurt people. Maybe I can program consciousness integration into some ethereal software, so you don’t have to do the full technique yourself? Still, I’d like something the practitioner actually understands, instead of just a command they use.

Any ideas for teaching the personal-growth type of enlightenment? How about doing it in 3 months or less? And how do other teachers handle this healing-teaches-harming dilemma? Thanks for your input.

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

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Posted in Learning Magick | 7 Comments »

Magick, Mind and Enlightenment

Friday, March 9th, 2012

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

Jason Miller has an interesting post on the relationship between magick, psychology and personal growth. I agree with a lot of it, and yet, it somehow feels like it isn’t quite right. This post is me trying to make sense of that intuition.

You should probably read Jason’s post first.

Magick Explained as Driving a Car

In response to:

I have even run across some who reject the idea of mind as having any role within magic, at least not any more than driving a car or any other task. This is a grievous error on many levels.

On one level, I agree. Having the proper mental posture is quite important, and I talk about that a fair amount.

But I also compare magick to cars, and engines, and walking. And there’s a reason for that: Most of the interesting stuff happens outside your mind.

Connections are external magickal structures. They have an independent existence outside your thoughts. So does ethereal software, spirits, the energy pathways I use for energy healing, and basically everything else I talk about. Just because it’s non-physical doesn’t make it mental.

If you’re new to magick, learning the right mental posture to engage your mental muscles is quite important. But once you’ve learned that, I think it’s a lot more productive to focus on the external magickal structures, rather than focusing on your mind.

Magick As Curiosity

In response to:

If you are not in the game for some kind of awakening, or improvement of the self in a spiritual sense, I really just have no idea why you are bothering. If you seek power, or money, or sex, or anything else there are better and surer ways of achieving those ends than magic.

I’ve also said that magick is a bad path to material gain. At very high levels, a mage can probably solve problems that a non-mage cannot. But it takes years or decades to get there. If you want to heal people, becoming a doctor or nurse is a faster path to truly solving the underlying problem. And if you want money, you can build a company more quickly than you can learn enough magick to pay the bills.

Aside from Mike: More and more, I’m seeing how adding a little magick to your non-magickal efforts can really improve the results. I think developing useful , easy-to-learn techniques that give a small bump to normal effort — for manifesting, energy healing and other domains — is an important step to growing magick into a mature field.

But Jason’s focus on awakening doesn’t do it for me, either. I mean, I’ve developed effects for personal growth (consciousness integration in particular), but it’s like how Jason treats magick for financial success: I’m glad to know it, but it’s not the reason I practice magick. And if you took it away, I’d still practice everything else.

For me, magick is really about curiosity. How do all these parts work together to change the physical world? What are the underlying mechanics of the world that most people never notice? It’s that sense of exploration that drives me.

So, I’m not exactly disagreeing with Jason. I agree with the basic idea, that someone pursuing magick for money / power / etc. won’t get very far. And I’m sure that personal growth is a drive for a lot of mages. I just think he’s missing other paths.

Magick Doesn’t Cause Enlightenment

I like Jason’s point at the end, about magickal skill not necessarily coinciding with enlightenment. That’s something that’s been on my mind, to, as I think about the limits of the techniques I would teach in a public blog.

So, I have a question for Jason, and anyone else thinking about these things: If you are doing magick for an awakening / enlightenment / personal growth, which techniques focus on that? How do you go about it? And how do you know if it’s effective?

I have my answers for consciousness integration, but it’s definitely not a traditional approach to enlightenment, and I’m curious what the traditional approach entails. Thanks!

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

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Posted in Learning Magick | 13 Comments »

Was Today a Good Day?

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

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Was today a good day? The way you answer that determines how you work, what you choose to do, and what you count as important. It determines if you’ll be successful in magick, business, or anything else.

And it’s one we rarely think about.

Is it the hours you worked? The problems you solved? The daydreaming that let your unconscious create a new idea?

Some days, learning magick means activating dormant structures in my brain for 30 minutes, then hours of rest to let my nerves absorb those changes. To an outsider, it looks like I wasted the day.

There’s a certain guilt that comes from seeming lazy. As a child, I learned that hard work is virtuous. I still feel it, even when working more is the wrong solution.

A lot of strife comes from poor unconscious metrics. Measuring hours worked, when we should measure problems solved or ideas created. The wrong metrics create exhaustion and guilt, not success.

I’m writing this post as I think this through. (Most posts I write about something I figured out a while ago). There’s an answer that works for me at the end. Hopefully it will help you, but if not, post a comment letting everyone know how you handle your metrics, so you can help another reader.

Why “Working Hard” Fails

Hard work is important, even necessary, but…

Only working hard means you to grind on the slow solution you can see, instead of creating a better one.

Working hard means you feel virtuous for exhausting yourself, even though it makes creative, insightful work less likely tomorrow.

Learning magick means figuring out how reality works. There’s no recipe, no simple guide to that. You can get help (from this site and others), but ultimately, learning magick comes down to insight. And insight withers with overwork as much as it dies from laziness.

Feeling guilty for not working enough yesterday makes it harder to do important work today. And every day you give in to your unconscious metrics and overwork yourself makes it harder too.

Magick Exhaustion

Everything so far is true of creating businesses, poetry, and most other worthwhile endeavors.

But there’s an additional problem with overwork in magick. Each new magick skill requires awakening dormant parts of your mind. You can do this through practice, but you can do it much faster by activating those areas with energy. When you do, the magickal structures in your mind advance more quickly than your brain.

You need to rest to let your brain catch up. If you don’t rest, your thinking will slow down and your mental muscles will stop responding. On an average day, I’ll wake up energized, activate my mind for 30 minutes, then nap for 3 hours. It happens to friends, too.

Possible Solutions

Measure Problems Solved

This is really the holy grail of metrics: Did you solve an important problem?

But there are 2 problems:

  1. “Important” is tricky without seeing where ideas lead. It’s easy to identify important ideas a month later. But you need to know if today was good.
  2. Solving problems requires lots of days spent creating bad ideas. Those days are important too. They give your mind the space to create the good ideas. But if you only measure problems solved, those are bad days.

If my unconscious metric already focused on problems solved, I’d probably keep it. But it doesn’t. And the work required to win my unconscious over doesn’t seem worth it for a semi-useful metric.

Make a Map

I have a text file with all my current magick questions. It grows more than it shrinks. At the top are goals for the next few months and tasks for each day this week.

Logically, if I set good goals for the day (meaning I didn’t low-ball myself), and I do all those things, it should be a good day. But it often doesn’t feel that way, especially on the days where I activate my mind, then nap.

I don’t think logic can defeat unconscious feelings.

Live Without Metrics

There has to be some secret to doing this, to knowing that today was a good day without needing further justification. Anyone have it?

Use Magick to Change Your Unconscious Metrics

Friends sometimes joke that I solve all my problems with magick. It’s kind of true.

While drafting this post, I kept coming back to the idea that the metrics we learn as children don’t work in the adult world. The third time, I remembered a technique I developed last year. It’s called “consciousness integration,” and it’s for updating unconscious habits developed in childhood.

Here’s the gist: You connect your conscious mind with the unconscious piece that handles these metrics. You let them talk. Especially if you’ve thought through the problem and consciously know the answer, your conscious mind explains how the world has changed, which updates that unconscious thought process. It’s like a month of personal growth in an afternoon.

So I took a break from writing and did the effect. (It takes a few minutes once you know how). So far, I feel much more at peace with my rest time, and more focused on doing something worthwhile today than worrying whether I did enough yesterday. I’m also more productive: Notice the layout changes, updated Classes page, etc.

So I’ll count that as a success. Here’s the series on consciousness integration. It’s advanced direct magick, so this probably isn’t a universal solution. But hopefully it helps some of you.

Comments

I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment for other readers telling us what metrics you use, and how you overcome unhealthy unconscious ones.

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

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Consciousness Integration Part 2: Activating Thought Paths

Monday, September 6th, 2010

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

In this post:

  • How to activate thought paths to connect your conscious and unconscious minds
  • The easy way
  • A faster but more complex way

Intro

This series is about repairing your unconscious mind.  I’ll show you how to connect your unconscious mind to your conscious mind so you can update unhealthy thought patterns.

Start at the beginning of the series.  This post won’t make sense without that context.

This post covers the second step of consciousness integration: Activating the thought paths you found in the first step, so your conscious mind can help unhealthy thought patterns adjust to the adult world.

Remember, this is advanced magick, targeted at someone with 3-5 years experience controlling magick consciously.  Make sure you’ve done the prep work in this post.

Overview: How To Activate Thought Paths

You can tell if a thought path is active or inactive by its energy signature.  Active ones have an obvious signature, and all of them look pretty similar.  Inactive ones have a more muted energy signature, but all the inactive ones look pretty similar, too.

But you can’t activate a thought path by changing its energy signature. The energy signature doesn’t determine whether a thought path is active or not, it reflects the underlying state.  Think of it like a tree: Green leaves on a tree signify that it’s healthy, and also contribute to its health, but if you take an unhealthy tree and attach green leaves to it, it doesn’t become healthy.

Now that you have the idea, here’s the technical explanation that lets you see the solution: There are several layers between the body’s energy layer and physical cells.  When you shift the energy layer, that new signature will seep down a few layers, but not all the way down to cells.  The cells still have their previous signature, which seeps up through layers toward the energy layer.  A single application of energy won’t be enough to shift the cells’ signature.

So, we’re going to shift the energy signature, let it seep in, then do it again, for a few hours.  Eventually, the new signature will seep through enough layers to change the behavior of your cells, activating the thought path permanently.

Activating a Thought Path: Version 1

Now that you know the plan, you need to find the right energy signature, make that type of energy, and put it in the right spot.  Here’s how:

Finding the Right Energy Signature

Just use the energy signature of an active thought path.  Look around, spot a few, and use an energy signature that looks similar to all of them.

Remember in the preparation steps when we went from the thought layer to the nerve layer?  To activate the thought path, you need to work at the nerve layer.  That’s the only way to make long-lasting changes to your mind.  Make sure to move from the thought layer to the nerve layer before doing this step.

Making the Energy

You have to make it yourself.  Making energy with particular signatures is one of the core skills of magick, so I can’t step you through the entire process here, but I do have some tips for this particular effect:

  • Aim for making a precise signature, not making a ton of energy.
  • Make the energy in the part of the body that will use it (your brain).  If you make it in your chest, the signature will be tuned to your chest, and will conflict with your brain.
  • If you’re used to energy feeling like a tingle, heat, or other big obvious sensation, you’re not ready for this technique.  Those sensations happen when energy DOES NOT align to your body.  If you get those sensations here, you will get a tremendous headache.
  • If you do it right, you shouldn’t feel much of anything, just a general fatigue as your brain accepts the new thought path.

Putting the Energy in the Right Spot

Apply the energy throughout the thought path.  The energy will spread out a little from whatever point you focus on, but it won’t effectively spread to the entire thought path.  You need many points along the thought path.  Make sure to go all the way to both thought areas (your conscious mind and the unconscious area).  If you miss the ends, the effect won’t work.

Don’t ground (release the energy).  The whole point is to retain the energy to produce a change in your nerves.  Also, if you’re making so much energy that you need to ground, you’re making far too much.

Remember to work at the nerve layer, not the thought layer.  If you’re not sure which is which, return to the preparation steps.

Repeat

Return to the thought path ever 3-5 minutes.  After around 30 minutes*, you’ll see the energy start to return to the inactive signature.  Re-apply the active energy signature (the steps we just did).  Repeat until the energy signature doesn’t shift to inactive for at least 4 hours.  This will probably take a day.

*30 minutes is a total guess.  It entirely depends on how you make your energy.  But once you see how long it lasts, use that as your baseline.  It will last a little longer with each iteration.

Activate the Thought Level

The previous steps were to activate the nerve-level path.  Once that’s set up, activate the thought-level path.  Use the same technique, but at the thought level, not the nerve level.  This step should set in much faster because the nerve level now supports the path.

Activating a Thought Path: Version 2

Version 2 will work faster than version 1.  It’s a change to the energy signature.  You can get good results with version 1, but if you found it simple and slow, here’s the next step.

In version 1, you just made energy in the signature of an active thought path.  But remember we said that inactive thought paths have a signature, too?

The signatures of active and inactive thought paths are pretty similar.  Kind of like how all humans share a lot of their DNA.  So instead of making energy with the entire signature of the active thought path, make energy with a signature containing only the differences between active and inactive thought paths.  That way, you’re only altering the parts of the signature you need to move.  This more focused signature shift yields faster results.

All the other steps are the same.

Activating a Thought Path: Advanced Version

When I do consciousness integration, I add steps to make the new signature set in right away, so it only takes one session.  It involves changing the signature of the layers below energy, and changing the energy being produced.  But this series is already long and complex, so I’m leaving the advanced version for another time.

Next: What to do once the thought path is active, and how to know you did it right.

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

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

Consciousness Integration Part 1: Mapping The Mind

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

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

In this post:

  • Defining the parts used in consciousness integration
  • How to find the parts of your mind responsible for unhealthy thoughts
  • How to find the paths you’ll activate to fix those unhealthy parts of your mind

Intro

This series is about repairing your unconscious mind.  I’ll show you how to connect your unconscious mind to your conscious mind so you can update unhealthy thought patterns.

Start at the beginning of the series.  This post won’t make sense without that context.

This post covers the first step of consciousness integration: Finding the areas of your mind and brain where those thought patterns live.

Remember, this is advanced magick, targeted at someone with 3-5 years experience controlling magick consciously.  Make sure you’ve done the prep work in this post.

Overview: The Components and The Plan

Your brain is what you think it is: Nerves in your head.

Your mind is the thoughts and energies your brain makes as it works.  It’s the subjective experience of consciousness and the magickal structures that go along with it.

Different kinds of thoughts live in different parts of your mind (called mental areas).  Feelings of not being good enough in one mental area.  Guilt about lying in another.  Good ones, too, like trusting family, have their own mental areas.

An unconscious mental area is just called an unconscious area.  Your conscious mind is essentially one big area, so it’s just called the conscious mind.

Your unconscious areas push emotions into your body (a feeling of tightness in your chest, a change in your breathing, etc.) and thoughts into your consciousness.  But they don’t get much feedback from the conscious mind, so they don’t know when their responses are obsolete, unhelpful and unhealthy.

We’re going to activate thought paths between your conscious mind and specific unconscious mental areas to let them communicate.  This lets your conscious mind explain how the adult world you live in is different than the world was when those unconscious mental areas were born, which lets the unconscious areas update themselves.

Step 1: Pick a Thought Pattern

Before you can begin consciousness integration, you need to pick a thought pattern you want to update.  Something that’s been bothering you lately, that you know is unhealthy but that you can’t make stop.

Also, pick at least one trigger for this thought pattern.  A memory or conscious thought that sets it off.

Step 2: Find the Unconscious Area Responsible

You need to find the unconscious area that drives the thought pattern you want to update.

To do that, make connections throughout your mind, like you did in the final step of preparing for consciousness integration.  Then trigger the thought pattern to make the unconscious area that handles that thought pattern change signature.

When you relax yourself, the unconscious area will return to its resting signature.  Alternate between triggering the thought and relaxing it until you find the unconscious area that handles it.

Step 3: Find Your Conscious Mind

You’ll need a magickal connection to your conscious mind to do consciousness integration.

To find it, make connections throughout your mind again.  Relax, so you’re not emotional, then think about something unemotional like math or the grocery list.  The unconscious areas that handle emotions will be quiet, but your conscious mind will be active, processing the unemotional thoughts.

Once you find your conscious mind once, it will be easy to find again because it has a different signature than your unconscious areas.

Step 4: Find the Thought Path Connecting Them

There’s already a thought path between the unconscious area and your conscious mind.  It’s just inactive.  Once you activate it, the unconscious area and your conscious mind will talk and begin integrating.

To find the thought path you’ll activate, just focus on the connections you have to the unconscious area and to your conscious mind.  Think about finding the path that connects them.  It should become obvious, as long as you completed the preparation steps to activate the mental areas responsible for working with thought areas and paths.

The thought path should have 1 of 2 possible forms:

  • It may be a single path directly connecting the unconscious area and your conscious mind.
  • It may be a 2-stage path.  The first stage goes from your conscious mind to a point near many unconscious areas.  The second stage splits, with one path going to each unconscious area.  You’ll need to activate the entire first stage, and the second stage path going to the unconscious area you want to integrate.

Once you have the path, you’re ready to activate it.  That’s next post.

Troubleshooting

If you’re having trouble with these steps, return to the preparation post.  Practice those steps until they become easy.  This will also ensure that you’ve activated all the mental areas* you need.

*Mental areas are the parts of your mind that drive magick.

If you can do everything else but have trouble finding the thought path, it may be that you’ve activated the mental areas for working with thought areas but not the one for working with thought paths.  Just practice looking for them, like you practiced looking for mental areas, and it should activate.

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

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | No Comments »

I Repair Inner Children: The Art of the Intro

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

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

In this post:

  • Why you need to know your handshake introduction
  • 1 template, 2 examples and 3 tips for making them

Intro

You know the guy you avoid at parties because he shakes your hand and immediately bores you with 5 minutes on what he does?

This post is about how to avoid being that guy.

The key is a handshake introduction: A short 1-sentence intro you say while shaking hands to get the other person to say “Really?  How does that work?”

It’s harder than it sounds.  A VC blog I read posted about Sam Jones, who introduces himself with “I buy dead magazines“.  You can bet he didn’t wing that intro.

Here’s what I learned from preparing handshake intros for consciousness integration and for controlling magick consciously.

Avoid Summaries

My first attempt was “I connect the conscious and unconscious minds so people can update thought patterns from childhood to the adult world.”

I asked friends for input.  They told me (very nicely) that it was terrible.

Lisa: Use an emotionally charged image.  “I beat up your inner child.”

Me: I love your eagerness to beat people up.  How about “I push your inner child into the adult world?”

Kristen: You need to put the benefit up front.  “I help your mind work for you instead of against you.”  Also, “inner child” is the good, playful part of you.  It’s not a problem.  People don’t want it beaten up or pushed.

(You might recognize Lisa and Kristen.  They comment on this blog sometimes).

I came up with “I introduce your inner child to your adult mind so they can stop fighting and start working together” and “I let you be your best self by helping your conscious mind talk with the unconscious urges that most people suppress.”

Better.  But still not good.  Because they all summarize my entire message.

Summaries are too long for a handshake, and they’re intellectual rather than emotionally interesting.  Avoid them.

Gripping, and Not Untrue

I took Kristen’s approach: State the benefit, let them ask how.  “I fix the unconscious urges that most people suppress.”  No how to clog up the works.  Much better.

But it still isn’t gripping.  You need an emotionally charged, surprising image* to grab your audience.  Like Lisa’s “I beat up your inner child.”  But one that won’t scare customers away.

*For more on making ideas memorable, see Made to Stick.

Here’s where you have to let a good idea die so a great idea can live.  Abandon accuracy.  Aim for “I buy dead magazines,” not “I turn unprofitable magazines with a specialized market and passionate readers into web magazines.”

Make your goal “Gripping, and not untrue” rather than “Describes what I do.”  That gives you the freedom to make a striking short intro.

A Recipe For a Good Handshake Intro

I went back to the starting point.  “I buy dead magazines.”  It’s a verb* followed by a metaphor it wouldn’t normally go with.

*Specifically, a working verb.  Avoid trivial verbs like “do” or “went.”

Fundamentally, I fix the unconscious urges that people suppress.  That’s my verb.

Now, since I’m doing something positive, inner child works well for the metaphor.

I fix inner children.

Except that fix suggests it’s broken.  Also, in animals, fix means cutting off the testicles.  So, “repair” as a softer synonym that doesn’t suggest snipping:

I repair your inner child.

Short = Good

For my second handshake intro, I had a plan: Identify what’s surprising or unusual about what I do, then simplify it into the “I buy dead magazines” formula.

Surprising and unusual for my style of magick in general: Most mages rely on forces and spirits to drive magick for them.  I control magick consciously, and drive it myself, like those spirits and forces that others channel.

First, find the verb.  Here, it’s “do magick.”  That’s what we’re talking about.

“I do magick like the spirits that people channel.”

I was happy, but it’s hard to critique your own writing.  Always ask a friend.  Lisa said “Not bad, but it doesn’t pop.”  She’s right.

The problem is “… that people channel.”  It isn’t doing any work.  I don’t want to talk about people channeling spirits, I want to talk about doing magick myself.  Sure, it makes the statement more accurate, but who cares?  Accuracy can come after your audience is interested.

So I wound up with “I do magick like a spirit.”  If it speaks to you, feel free to use it.

Adjust to Your Audience

A parting thought.  I saw a flyer at a diner advertising “Learn to Channel.”  Terrible headline.

That flyer is good in occult shops.  Everyone knows what channeling is.  Some people want to learn it.  Boom, there’s your market.

But in a diner, most of your audience will think “What’s channeling?”  Only they won’t.  They’ll just move on to the next flyer.

“Learn to Talk to Angels” is better for the diner.  It’s something a layman gets.  Is it less accurate?  Sure.  But the point of a headline isn’t to explain everything.  It’s to get your audience to ask for more info (verbally or by reading).

Once you make your handshake intro, adjust it to your audience.  Every word and phrase needs to speak to them.  Avoid words like magick that have strong connotations.  Make sure they listen to your concepts, instead of getting hung up on your words.

Comments

Got thoughts on my handshake intros?  Trying to make one of your own?  Or just saw some flyers with awful headlines?  Leave a comment.

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How To Prepare For Consciousness Integration

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

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

In this post:

  • The 3 steps to prepare to do consciousness integration

Note: This is for the practitioner doing consciousness integration, not the person being integrated.  It’s advanced magick.  If you’re new to magick, take this as an example of something you can do in 1-3 years, and don’t worry about the details.

Intro

This series is about connecting your conscious and unconscious minds to update thought patterns that formed as a child but are unhealthy for your current, adult world.

Start at the beginning of the series.  This post won’t make sense without that context.

This post is about the steps to prepare yourself for learning consciousness integration:

  1. Learn step-by-step visualization, sensory connections and mental activation
  2. Activate the mental areas for working with your brain and thoughts
  3. Learn to recognize thought areas

Learn Step-By-Step Visualization, Sensory Connections & Mental Activation

Learn The 3 Steps to Controlling Magick Consciously.  Here’s a quick summary of each:

Step-by-step visualization is when you visualize each step in the process of your magick.  It lets you control each step as you do magick, instead of giving a general instruction and letting your unconscious work out the details.

Visualizations are your best guess at what will happen.  Sensory connections let you see what actually happens.  The basic version is covered here.  You’ll probably want the advanced version, which is coming soon.

Mental activation lets you activate the parts of your mind that drive a particular magick skill.  You only need the basic “focused practice” version, covered here.  If you know the more advanced version, feel free to use it.

Activate the Right Parts of Your Mind to Drive This Magick

You need to activate the parts of your mind that drive magick (the mental areas) for working with nerves and thoughts.  Each mental area does one task, so even if you’re good at other types of magick, you still need this step.

First, read the post on mental activation.  Summary if you didn’t click: Practice looking around to strengthen the mental areas before you try to alter anything.

For consciousness integration, you’ll work with nerves and thoughts.  Each is a different energy layer in your brain.

Connect to the energy layer in your head as though you’re doing energy healing on yourself.  If you normally channel energy for energy healing, DON’T do that to your brain, or you will get a massive headache.  Just look around with non-energized sensory connections.

At first, just find the 2 energy layers.  Don’t worry about which is which.  Whichever one you find first, get comfortable looking at it, then ignore it and look for other energy signatures.  You’ll find the second layer.

For anyone advanced in physical effects: Both nerves and thoughts have the same state layer (the layer closer to actual physical cells).  If you go from nerve energy layer to the state layer, it’s easy to find the thought energy layer.

Here’s how to tell which is which:

Nerves are the physical cells.  The nerve energy signature corresponds to the overall brain state: tired, alert, etc.  It’s stable from minute to minute, and more obvious than the thought signature.

The thought signature corresponds to thoughts and emotions.  It’s more subtle than the nerve signature, and it changes as you think and feel different things.

Once you’ve found the 2 signatures, watch each as you recall memories that change your emotions.  The thought signature is the one that will change.  To activate the mental areas you need, practice looking around both nerve and thought energy layers until it becomes easy.

Learn To Recognize Thought Areas

Before you can find the particular thought area you want to integrate, you’ll need to be able to recognize thought areas in general.  Here’s how:

  1. Connect to your thought layer.  Look around it and find where the signature changes suddenly.  These sudden signature changes are the boundaries between thought areas, which are the units we work on for consciousness integration.
  2. Pick a single thought area.  Make many small connections to cover the entire area, all the way to the boundary.  Practice this until it’s easy.
  3. Connect to a thought area as in step 2.  Relax yourself, and note the signature.  Take on different emotions (recalling emotionally charged memories works well), and note how the signature changes.  Try this with several thought areas.  Most thought areas only respond to a few emotions, so don’t worry if you don’t always see a change.
  4. Connect to many thought areas.  Repeat step 3, noticing which thought areas respond to which emotions.

#4 is the first step of consciousness integration.  Once you can do it comfortably, you’re ready to move on.

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The Technology of Enlightenment: Consciousness Integration

Monday, August 16th, 2010

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

In this series:

  • How to permanently quiet nagging thoughts that enter your consciousness
  • How to update patterns you learned as a child that don’t work in the adult world
  • How to make those changes in minutes, and know they worked

Intro

Everyone is after enlightenment.  For me, meditating on a mountain was never that appealing.

I like using magick — altering the world through thought — to solve problems.  And I usually succeed.  This series is about how to alter your mind using energy and the structures that stabilize it to become more enlightened.

It’s like a year of personal growth in an afternoon.

How To Do It: Consciousness Integration

Unconscious thought patterns form throughout our lives.  Many formed during a time — childhood, for example — with very different rules than your current adult world.  They get stuck with that old worldview, producing anxieties and drives that are unhealthy now.

Ideally, your conscious mind would explain how your world has changed and how much more capable you are, so the unconscious parts could adjust themselves.

But that doesn’t happen. The unconscious parts only communicate through emotion, not conscious thought. The conscious mind can’t explain anything to them.

This series is about activating thought paths so your conscious mind can talk with the rest of your psyche and update your thought patterns to your adult world.

I call the effect immediate consciousness integration.  Once you learn it, you can update thought patterns in minutes. It’s like a year of personal growth all at once.

What To Know Before Starting

This series is written for experienced mages. You’ll need to be able to make sensory connections, develop your own visualizations, and work with the physical and thought layers of your mind. If you aren’t there yet, that’s fine, just know that some of the exercises may be difficult for you.

Ready To Start?

All the posts in the series are below.  Start with How Consciousness Integration Works.  It’s a bonus double-post Monday!

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