Posts Tagged ‘Debugging’

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A Friend’s Manifesting Stopped Working. Here’s Why (and How to Fix It)

Monday, April 17th, 2017

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“The sigil I created in your class worked amazingly well. But none of the sigils I’ve done since then have worked,” said D, a talented energy worker with no formal training. She was speaking about a sigils / manifesting class taught by M, who has at least a decade of experience with Chaos Magick, Thelema, and other systems.

It might not seem like it, but that’s enough information to make a good guess at the problem. What do YOU think it might be? Yes, you, reading this article. Debugging techniques is an important skill, and here’s a chance to practice. If you want to play along, make a guess, just say it to yourself or write it in the comments.

One friend suggested a possibility: Work done in private can feel different than work done in public. Maybe D just gets better results in a public setting? This lead to much conversation about public vs private and how to adjust.

But that answer didn’t seem to quite fit. If I were to verbalize my reasons, it’s that the difference (“great results” vs “total failure”) was too large to be caused by something as subtle as “work done in private can feel different.” We should be looking for a structural error in D’s technique, some missing piece that was filled in by being in the class. That’s how I’d verbalize my reasoning. But in the moment, it was closer to an unconscious, “No, that doesn’t break enough pieces.”

For those of you playing along at home: Revisit your guess, see how it sounds now, and make another guess if you like.

Here’s my answer: In the class, M was engaging their ethereal software as they demonstrated the sigil techniques. That made it easy for D to (unconsciously) connect to M’s ethereal software. D, being talented with energy, got good results using M’s ethereal software. (And M, being well-trained, has good ethereal software for manifesting. M would refer to that ethereal software as a Servitor or Egregore, btw.)

But D wasn’t conscious of any of this. She didn’t make a lasting connection to M’s software, and couldn’t access it on her own. So at home, D performed the same outward steps, built the same energy, but didn’t have M’s ethereal software to handle the actual manifesting, and therefore got no results.

How can D fix this? Do another sigil with M, and pay attention to the forces involved. Either make a lasting connection herself, or ask a spirit she knows to remember the force for her. (D does a lot of work with spirits.)

M has previously described my classes as “a kick to the side of the head, in a good way.” M pondered my analysis, then excitedly agreed.

This was a fun puzzle for me, debugging D’s technique. It was also validating, to use my work to help a friend. I hope you playing along at home.

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 8 Comments »

How to Use the Sigil

Sunday, September 4th, 2016

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Christina, trained in Reiki and other systems, asks:

When I tested your first sigil [in 2012], the response was clear to me, at least the first time. After that, not so much. And this time, I missed the mark. Why could that be?

There are several possibilities.

I want to back up and say: When a scientist says, “There are several possibilities,” he’s really saying, “I don’t know, but here’s where I’d start looking.” And that’s what I’m saying: I don’t know why it didn’t work. (If I did, I probably would have fixed it.) But let’s talk about the moving parts, what might have gone wrong, and how you can start exploring this with me.

First, the moving parts:

  • A sigil, with ethereal software bound to it.
  • These forces need to notice when you look at the sigil.
  • They need to pick up your request and create the obvious connection.
  • You need to notice the connection.

What might go wrong?

If I didn’t bind the ethereal software to the sigil correctly, none of this will work. That’s certainly possible. But I tested it on myself and it seemed to work for me. Also, this isn’t something you can test with me. So let’s assume the ethereal software is bound correctly.

What about the forces noticing your gaze? Try this: You know how to connect to someone by looking at their picture, right? The sigil uses some of the same forces. So practice connecting to a person based on their picture a few times, then do the same thing when you look at the sigil.

What about picking up your request and creating the obvious connection? This requires a bit of background. People often use multiple pieces of ethereal software. As a Reiki practitioner, you already have the Reiki software (typically called “The Universe.”) If you practice other systems, you might have other software. (You might also have ethereal software not associated with a formal system, such as for natural psychic intuitions some people have.) So, multiple pieces of ethereal software.

Usually, that’s fine. Occasionally, the ethereal software conflicts with each other. I’ve seen software that wants to be the only one working with a person. I’ve seen software that interpreted the “obvious connection” as an attack, and protected the person. Sometimes, different ethereal softwares don’t get along.

Try this: Engage your normal ethereal software. Just think about doing your normal practice, building Reiki energy or asking for psychic intuitions or whatever else you do. Then send the message (the same way you’d send a request for information, energy, or anything else): “I’m about to connect to another force, I want you to allow it to connect and trust it.” Keep thinking that while you focus on the sigil.

Before asking for the obvious connection, tell your other forces, “I’m about to have the new ethereal software make some obvious connections. Allow them, even if it seems like an attack.” Then try the obvious connection.

Also, if you shield yourself against energy or connections, try opening your shielding before doing all this.

Will this work? I don’t know. We’re debugging this technique together, thinking about what might have gone wrong, testing it out, seeing what matters and what doesn’t. I’m excited to get your results, because this is how we all learn about ethereal software and sigils and the mechanisms behind our practice.

Thanks for exploring with me.

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Posted in Experiments | 2 Comments »

When Visualization Fails

Monday, April 14th, 2014

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A decade ago, I figured out energy orgasms. I’d be making out with a woman, send her energy, and she’d spontaneously orgasm. No genital contact, no suggestion, just energy. Worked with multiple women, including several non-mages and one energy worker who sent the energy back to me (which was fun, too).

I never understood what I was doing. I just thought about building energy in my groin, sent it to her groin and her head, and it just worked.

Until it didn’t.

I moved across the country, didn’t date much for a couple months. I also learned more about energy and shielding, which changed the way I built energy. And the energy orgasms stopped.

The visualization had been working because, through sheer luck, the natural default way I built energy happened to get a lot of things right. Wonderful. Except as I learned more, those natural defaults changed in some small way, and the same visualization produced slightly different energy. And zero orgasms.

For example:

  • What tissue do you build the energy in — nerves, muscles, something else? I had no idea.
  • Does the energy go to her aura, energy layer, or deeper layers? No clue.
  • What signatures of energy do you want? Um, the ones that my body produces when we make out?

I’m returning to this problem this month. Instead of focusing on sensations in my body, I’m using sensory connections to map the magickal structures involved in this energy, so I can make a plan. Instead of visualizing energy in my groin, I’m consciously directing my ethereal muscles to build energy in my nerves, and send it to my aura. This time, when I get it working, I’ll know why it works, so I can debug it and improve on it.

Which is really the point of direct magick.

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Spotting the Unexpected

Wednesday, February 12th, 2014

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I’m training myself to say, “Hold on, something unexpected just happened!”

Last week, I learned a better way to read messages into my mind. So when a spirit or ethereal software sends a message, I can place that message into my brain in a more precise way. Clearer communication, less fatigue, good stuff.

This week, I’m training in healing techniques, using that communication method to ask questions and get answers. Only, I’m getting just as tired as before. Which isn’t terrible, but isn’t great.

A year ago, I would have just pushed through the fatigue and done the training. Which also isn’t great.

This time, I said, “Something unexpected just happened! This should be easier than it is.”

The answer is simple: I was focused on the conversation, not the communication techniques, and I reverted to old habits. To fix it, I just decided to focus more on communication. No mistery, no investigation, just a simple fix.

And yet, a year ago, I would have missed this, because I hadn’t yet trained myself to spot subtle-but-unexpected events.

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Debugging Psychic: Over-Practicing

Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

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A few weeks ago, I woke up without any psychic information. Here’s how I fixed it, which might help you debug your own magick.

First, I contacted the ethereal software I use for manifesting and psychic info. (“Ethereal software” = My term for the forces we channel for energy, info, and other magick.)

Normally, to talk to that software, I just think in a particular mental posture, and it picks up my message. That’s one of the benefits of integrating the software with my mind for psychic information. But that wasn’t working that day.

So instead, I prepared a message, packaging up the signatures of my mind as I thought each word. I found a still-good connection to the psychic software, recognized it based on its signature. (If I didn’t have a connection already, or couldn’t recall its signature, I would have found it the same way I initially found it, by asking a spirit I know.) And I asked, “Why aren’t you connected to my mind for simple communication?”

It’s answer: Yes, the connections weren’t working properly this morning. Probably, when you slept, part of your mind shifted — this sometimes happens when you practice hard. I’ve fixed it.

And it had. But what happened?

By “part of your mind shifted,” I think it meant that the parts of my mind it communicates with changed signature slightly, so its connections to them were in the wrong signature.

Why? Here’s my best guess: A few days before, I’d trained in some new concepts, which stretched the parts of my mind I use for communication. That stretching was exhausting, but in a particular way, like working on a hard math problem or holding an entire computer program in my head. I had to rest for hours after each session.

Once those sessions were done, I rested for a few days. And it seems that, during that rest, the parts of my mind involved in communication changed. Hopefully, they became stronger, or more flexible, or otherwise better. But whatever happened, it shifted my mind’s signature. The result? My psychic software’s connections were now in the wrong signature for my mind.

The solution was easy. But I’m glad to know it, because this will likely come up again for me, and maybe for you. Hope it helps.

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When Communication is Exhausting

Friday, December 20th, 2013

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Today’s post is for people who work with spirits a lot.

You know how most spirits are easy to talk to, but sometimes, a particularly advanced spirit sends concepts that just make your brain exhausted? Their concept refuses to transform into a thought or word in your mind, and the harder you focus on it, the more exhausted you become.

It feels like reading a graduate textbook, where the author keeps using specialized words you have to look up. Have you experienced this?

I’ve been running into it more and more, as I meet more advanced spirits. It happens when I’m training in a new topic with an expert. They have concepts I’m not ready for, concepts that take too many steps to think. It’s like if you want to explain how a virus works, but the person doesn’t know any biology. You’d need to start with DNA and cells and so on before you can get into viruses. If you just say, “A virus deposits DNA into living cells,” without explaining DNA or cell, the person might nod, but they won’t grasp any meaning. That’s what it’s like communicating with these advanced spirits: One complex concept might be an entire sentence, and my mind doesn’t know what half the words mean.

I’ve noticed that this doesn’t always happen. Spirits who specialize in communication don’t seem to have this problem. They can say the equivalent of, “A virus deposits DNA,” and the concept of DNA is so clear, I can grasp it as I’m thinking about the larger sentence. But most spirits can’t do that.

My normal solution is to recognize when this happens, and stop trying to read the concept. Seriously, just put it down or you’ll exhaust yourself. Instead, ask them to step you through the concept more slowly. They’re always happy to, and often devote an entire training session (10-15 minutes) to it.

(Another solution is to learn to place the message into your mind like those communication experts do. I’m working on that now, and it’s not easy.)

But there’s good news: If a spirit sends concepts that are too complex for you to read, it means they have something new and interesting to say. And the hard part of training is finding the spirit, which you’ve already done. So, just ask them to slow down, break the training up into multiple sessions, and enjoy learning something new.

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

Debugging My Body’s Energy

Monday, November 25th, 2013

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This week, I found an error I’d been making when building energy in my body. One small error. But it was enough to make my magick fail.

The error started years ago. So, let me back up a bit.

I never really learned to use energy in my body. Sure, I learned an energy meditation early on, but I then focused on using connections for protection, on sending instructions to ethereal software, and on awakening my ethereal muscles. When I did healing work, I would connect to the injured tissue and use that person’s energy for the healing technique. I got two decades into magick without ever learning to use the energy in my body for much of anything.

Because I never focused on the skill, I was just focusing on my intent, “Build energy to arouse my partner,” and letting my ethereal muscles do whatever came naturally. (“Ethereal muscles” = The parts of my brain that move energy, connections, and other magick.)

That’s how most people do magick: Focus on your intent, let your unconscious do what it does. But sometimes, your ethereal muscles do the wrong thing. And when that happens, the only solution is to figure out what they should do, then guide them through each step of the process. Which is what I did this weekend.

What went wrong: Remember all that energy healing? It mostly focused on tendons, ligaments, and muscles. That’s just what happens to be injured in me and my friends. So, with 100+ hours doing healing techniques on those tissues, that’s what my ethereal muscles would connecting to when I’d think about working with my own body.

That’s bad, because when you want to build energy for someone else to feel, you want to build energy that interacts with their nerves. That’s what produces that tingling feeling: Subtle changes to nerves. To affect nerves, I needed to build energy in my own nerves. By building energy in my muscles, tendons, and ligaments, I was causing subtle, temporary changes to their muscles, tendons, and ligaments, which have no way of sending signals to the brain or producing any tangible sensations. It’s the wrong way to do energy in the body.

The solution was easy: After training with a spirit who explained this to me, I connected specifically to my nerves, and amplified their signature. With very little effort, I felt a tingling and power throughout my body, like after a long energy meditation. It’s not that I’m making more energy now, it’s that all the energy is targeting my nerves, which produce the tingling sensations. I’ll test this with friends soon, and post the results.

(What if I didn’t have that healing experience? Then I probably would have built energy in all my tissues, which should work too. But this is exactly why I value consciously guiding my ethereal muscles: Because you never know when your ethereal muscles will do something wacky, and the only way to spot and fix it is to watch them and figure out what they should be doing.)

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Posted in Energy Healing | No Comments »

Mystery Solved (Book’s Ethereal Software)

Saturday, August 10th, 2013

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If you’ve followed the comments on the old post about beta testing the ethereal software for my book, you know there was a mystery recently. Today, I solved it. And, as is often the case, the answer is less of a deep revelation, and more of a simple technique I was doing wrong.

A little background: To teach readers magick, I had some spirits I work with make some ethereal software. I tied the software to a sigil, so readers can access it. And I posted the sigil, to verify that readers would, in fact, get the connections.

A week or two ago, a reader said she didn’t notice anything while looking at the sigil. That’s common enough, since non-mages generally don’t notice connections, but in writing my reply, I looked at the sigil too, and didn’t notice any connections myself. Odd, but I tied the software to the sigil over a year ago, and I’m no expert at that. Maybe it wore off?

Then another reader tested it out again. (This is one of the reasons I love blogging: Getting this kind of feedback and help from readers. Thanks, guys!) He found that everything was working. So I tested it again, and again found nothing. My guess was that his mind was used to contacting the software, and looking at the sigil simply reminded his unconscious of the software, and it made the connection based on his memory of the software’s signature, without actually using the sigil itself.

A few days later, another reader tested it, and also found it was working. Which makes it less likely that the sigil has faded. I tested it again, and again found nothing. But I kept at it, and noticed a very light connection being blocked by my shielding.

Yup, that’s the software’s connection. Once I let it in, everything’s working again. And once I told my ethereal muscles to trust that connection from the software, the sigil works again for me, quite quickly.

Here’s what happened: I hadn’t used that software in a year or more, and my ethereal muscles forgot to trust it. Like if you don’t visit a website for a year, and then you stumble on it again, and you’re not sure if you recognize it. Since they didn’t trust it, my shielding wasn’t allowing its connections in. A simple error on my part, and a nice reminder that magick is really complicated.

And once again, thank you to Grab, Nikki, and all my readers who’ve helped me with this testing.

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | 5 Comments »

Psychic Info: Why I Insist on Complete Sentences

Friday, April 26th, 2013

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How a 1-word answer steered me wrong. Note: Written 2 weeks ago, before leaving for India.

I’m booking a hotel for Hyderabad, India. I’ll be consulting there, and the client recommended two hotels. I asked my psychic software, “Which hotel should I pick?”

Answer: “Closer.” Actually, a bunch of words that my quick-and-distracted communication method didn’t read, but quite clearly, the concept of “closer.”

So I figure, get the one closer to the client. But I also figure, maybe some of that other stuff was important, so let’s slow down and read it.

I ask again, using a better communication technique. Answer: “Get the place closer to the downtown, you’ll like it better.” Which is the one further away from the client.

It’s only recently that I’ve had two communication techniques to compare like this. And, if I hadn’t used the better communication, I might not have realized anything was amiss — I’d only ever see one hotel, so it’s hard to realize I’d like the other one better. So, last year, this may have been happening without my realizing it.

How might you compensate, if you can’t get full sentences reliably yet? Ask yes / no questions. “Of the two hotels I’m considering, should I book this one?” In other words, gear your question for a one-word answer, and make it hard to misunderstand.

(And you can add some robustness by asking the same question of the other one — you should get one yes and one no, so if you get two yeses or two nos, you know something went wrong.)

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Debugging Psychic: Finally Getting It, Part II

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

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This series is about debugging my psychic intuitions, and finally getting it right. Last post, I told you about the first of three ingredients to that success. Today, I’ll tell you about the other two.

Constant Connection

Psychic intuitions come from ethereal software. The software makes a connection to your mind, leaves that connection open, and whenever it has information to send, it uses that connection to send you the information.

The problem came from my shielding. Years ago, I’d set my mental muscles to trust only a very few connections, and when I went to sleep, my mental muscles automatically closed all untrusted connections. Which is exactly what you want to happen, almost all the time. Except that I’d forgotten about trusted vs untrusted connections, and had no idea why my psychic intuitions were turning off every night.

(This is an example of mental muscles doing what you tell them, rather than what you intend.)

I figured it out while researching erotic energy. I was trying to leave a connection open with a lover overnight. It didn’t work. The connection was closed when I woke up. I realized it was because I hadn’t told my mental muscles to trust that connection, and once I realized that, it was obvious that the same thing might be happening with my connection to this ethereal software.

The solution was easy: Ask the ethereal software to set up its connection to my mind, then tell my mental muscles to trust the connection and integrate the connection with my shielding. (I’ll discuss the details in another post.) Since doing that, the connection has stayed open.

(This is one of the reasons it’s important to work with multiple fields of magick: The solutions to a problem often involve insights from unrelated techniques.)

Asking For the Right Thing

I’d tried setting up psychic intuitions many times before, but each time, I’d asked for a particular type of information. “Guide me to be successful in X,” something like that.

This last time was a different request. I don’t even know the full command I used, which is unusual. But I was visiting Lisa, talking about her psychic intuitions and my difficulties with this project. Normally, the ethereal software doesn’t monitor what I say or think (because it’s not connected to my mind), but it’s connected to Lisa, so it was aware of our conversation. It contacted me, saying:

I can set you up for everything you’re thinking about, just ask me and ask for training. Don’t ask the trainer how to do it, just ask me for what you want, and ask the trainer to help you use it properly.

A few weeks later, I called my trainer, called the ethereal software, and he watched as I asked it to “do that setup you talked about the other day, to enable psychic intuitions.” It made connections to my mind, told me to integrate my shielding with those connections, and handled everything else. I spent about 10 minutes actively paying attention, then the software ran for 1-2 days, setting everything up, while I rested.

I’m not sure why this different command worked, or if the command even mattered. I don’t recall if I tried integrating with shielding before I tried this new command, or if I changed the two variables at once. (I know, very unscientific, but I wanted it to work, dammit, so I went with my best guess, rather than a conservative approach to tease out the active ingredients.)

But it seems likely that asking the software to “set up so I can get psychic intuitions” results in something different than just asking for the intuitions themselves. So, until I hear that it’s unnecessary, this command is part of my recipe for setting up psychic intuitions.

Next

Like setting up a computer network, the hard part is getting everything set up, and the fun part is using it. And now that my communication with the ethereal software is up and running, we get to use it.

Next post, I’ll introduce the idea of subscribing to psychic data streams, like you subscribe to newsletters and rss feeds, and how that lets you control what information you want to receive.

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