Posts Tagged ‘Debugging’

Debugging Psychic: Finally Getting It

Monday, March 4th, 2013

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In October 2012, I found that my psychic intuitions weren’t working. I’d tried setting them up earlier that year, but had missed some steps. What steps? I didn’t know.

I’d already been debugging psychic intuitions, and for the next several months, I kept debugging. Repeatedly. But this last month, I’ve finally found some success. I think I have a handle on the steps it took, and it’s time to share.

But let’s start with a review.

Becoming Psychic the Hard Way

For several years, I’ve known a simple method to turn on psychic intuitions: You contact ethereal software for manifesting, ask it to set up for always-on psychic intuitions, and wait 4-6 months while it does that setup. I did this with Lisa in 2008 or so (before I started blogging), and I’m pretty confident it would work for me, too.

And yet… I felt like doing it the hard way was worth it. Partly because I want to use dozens of pieces of ethereal software, which makes a half-year preparation step cumbersome. (Also, there might be issues with having that many connections to my mind.) Also, I stubbornly want to understand how everything works, and it bothers me to have to choose the easy way. And partly because of I generally find that doing things the hard way leads to worthwhile results, even if I don’t know what that result is right now.

In this case, “the hard way” means handling the communication myself, at least partially, so the ethereal software doesn’t require that long setup process. Which, in practice, means using level 2 communication, where you take the signatures that your mind goes through as you think your message, grab them, and hold them for the software to read. To receive, you move the software’s reply into your mind yourself, rather than having the software place it there.

That’s where I was in the last post on psychic intuitions: Learning better communication, getting good results when I’d explicitly ask a question, able to have intuitions guide me through my day, but every morning, I’d wake up without any connection to the ethereal software, and without any intuitions coming in.

It turns out, there are three main elements to getting psychic intuitions working: Communication, connection, and asking for the right thing. Let’s discuss each.

Communication

I initially thought communicating psychic intuitions would be easy. Or maybe I thought it was hard, but I was somehow good at it already. Either way, I was wrong: Listening to messages while you’re distracted is hard, especially if you’re handling some of the communication yourself. It takes a lot of practice.

At first, I didn’t know about the different communication techniques, or all the steps involved in each level. But even after I learned level 2 communication, I didn’t realize how huge the gap is between doing a technique once, slowly, with all my focus, and doing it reliably while distracted. That’s a matter of months, not days.

I never sat down to become more reliable with distracted communication. I think I knew it was important, but I find it hard to repeatedly practice something that’s not immediately useful. I just don’t do the work — I intend to, but I don’t, and knowing this about myself, I find strategies that require less willpower. So, I learned level 3 communication, which uses level 2 communication as a substep, then I used L3 communication every day for manifesting, while fully focused. Six months later, I’d put in enough practice hours to communicate reliably and quickly enough, even while distracted.

(That’s my general tip, by the way: Learn to do something useful, then you’ll practice every day without realizing it.)

So, that’s ingredient #1: Communication. Not super-advanced communication, just reliable, fast level 2 communication, practiced well enough to work while you’re distracted. It takes a few months of daily manifesting to get there.

Next post, we’ll discuss connections and the problems of over-shielding.

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Debugging Psychic: Learning Level 2 Communication

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

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When I started debugging my psychic intuitions, I thought the problem was the ethereal software. Not that the software itself was broken, but that I had it configured wrong. I thought I would learn the right commands to ask the software to do the right things, and everything would simply work.

But the problem turned out to be my communication. I thought I was good enough because I’d more-or-less learned level 4 communication. But it turned out, I was only doing a sloppy level 4, and had never really learned level 2. I only properly knew level 1 communication, and that just wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go.

That takes us up to today’s post, about my training in level 2 communication. I called the same spirit that tested the various communication levels, and asked him how to do level 2 communication. The answer:

  • To send, you think the message, and use your mental muscles (the ones that handle communication) to hold and sustain the signatures that your mind creates as you think that message. You sustain those signatures until the receiver (the spirit or ethereal software) picks them up.
  • To receive, you let the sender (the spirit or software) connect its message to your thinking mind. (The message is made of the signatures corresponding to the thoughts being sent, similar to how you created signatures when sending.) Then, you use your mental muscles (again, the ones for communication) to sink those signatures into your thinking mind, which drops the message into your thoughts.

I’ve honestly lost all sense of how simple or complex a technique sounds, but this one was pretty easy. Everything in there is also a step for level 4 communication*, so I already more-or-less knew how to do them.

*On level 4 containing level 2: I think this is intentional. It would make sense to add one additional step at a time, so level 3 adds one step to level 2, and level 4 adds one step to level 3.

I discovered, though, that there’s a huge difference between more-or-less knowing a technique, and actually knowing it. Once I got the technique right, the thoughts entered my mind with some force, so I couldn’t not think them. Even when I sort-of-did level 4 communication before, the message wasn’t this clear or easy to read, because I wasn’t doing the level 2 parts of the communication as well as I am now.

That clarity is what makes it tiring, really. When you think normally, your brain’s signature flows up to your thinking mind. Communication, when done properly, places your thinking mind into a state that doesn’t match your brain activity, then carries that new state down into the brain. Clearer communication means a more pronounced shift, and the clearer it is, the more tiring it is. I’m still getting used to it.

But even so, I’m using level 2 communication for pretty much everything: Manifesting, other training, and even social calls with spirits. My psychic intuitions seem to be more accurate, and communication in general is much clearer for me. Plus, the spirits tell me this is easier on them, too. It’ll take a while until I’m really happy with my communication techniques, but this is exactly what I need to practice, not only to learn psychic intuitions, but also to remove the “more-or-less”-ness from my other communication techniques.

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

Debugging Psychic: Making a Plan

Friday, October 12th, 2012

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Last post, I’d picked a goal: Get good enough with communication that it’s easy to develop psychic intuitions. This post, I want to share my plan to reach that goal, and the progress I’ve made so far.

The Plan

A plan starts with where you are now, and gets you where you want to go. So, let’s start with where I am now:

  • I can approximate level 4 communication when I’m focused.
  • I can’t get level 2 communication working, even when I’m focused.
  • And I’m not exactly sure what each of these communication levels are. (The software uses them, so I’ve adopted its terms, but I don’t know the exact steps for level 2 communication.)

The last item, I think, is the real problem: I’ve been debugging level 4 communication, but never really learned levels 2-3.

Normally, I’d call up my mentor, have him contact a spirit who’s really good at communication, I’d show that spirit what I’m doing, and get some tips. But I’ve been doing that for about a year, and it’s just not working.

Why not? Well, I’m getting spirits who are experts in communication, which is good. But they’re not experts at teaching communication. And there’s a difference — just think about a friend who’s great with computers, or sports, or picking up dates, but can’t explain any of it to you.

So, I asked for trainers who had experience teaching every level of communication. I got three: One who teaches levels 1-5, another who teaches 3-8, and another who teaches ascended-level communication and can answer any deep questions I have. Then I asked them to assess the gaps in my communication skills.

First Steps: Find the Gaps

On a half-hour train ride last Sunday, I called my trainers, taking notes on my phone. I thought it might take a while to find the gaps, but I was so wrong. Here’s how long it took to uncover the first problem:

  • Level 1 communication is easy: You just relax your mind and receive the message. That worked in about 10 seconds. No surprise there.
  • Level 2 simply failed. I thought it would be obvious what to do, or that my mental muscles would just do it if I thought, “Receive the message” really hard. But no, I didn’t have a clue, and I didn’t get even a hint of the message.

Well, that was easier than I thought. And quite helpful: I hadn’t realized how bad I was at level 2 communication, and if I had, I never would have expected psychic intuitions to just work. Now that we know the problem, it’s an easy fix. (That’s next post.) Plus, now that I know how useful this gap assessment is, I’m going to do it for everything else I do, too.

Next: Training in level 2 communication, and a few closing thoughts on this series.

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

Debugging Psychic: Why I Rejected the Easy Path

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

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Today, I’m thinking about my path to develop reliable intuitions. I could use the technique that worked for Lisa:

  • Find ethereal software that supports psychic intuitions. (I’ve done this already.)
  • Tell the software to integrate with your mind for level 1 communication.
  • Practice for 3-6 months while the software sets up, and then you’re good to go.

That’s how we swapped her from some not-so-good ethereal software to the better version she’s using now, and it worked well. I could even use the same ethereal software as her, so the technique might not need any adjustments. And even if it needs some tweaks, that should be much easier than developing a whole new technique from scratch.

And yet, I don’t want to do that. I want to solve this by learning more advanced communication. So, my question today is, why do I have that inclination, and is it a good idea?

Time

At first, I didn’t go Lisa’s route because of the time involved. I thought my current communication skills would translate to psychic intuitions if I just found the right commands for the ethereal software. But they’re not.

At this point, it’s probably 3-6 months whichever way I go, though there is the risk that the non-easy paths will take much longer.

Dismissing An Excuse

I use a dozen or more pieces of ethereal software each month, and that’s going to increase over time. And if each one takes 3-6 months, that’s a problem.

Except, that’s just an excuse. Sure, it’s logical, but saying it doesn’t satisfy the unsure-ness in my mind. The 3-6-month integration is just for software that needs to communicate with me continuously, while I’m distracted. Most ethereal software doesn’t require that. The time constraint sounded logical, but I don’t think it holds water.

My Gut

If I’m really honest, it’s my gut feeling that’s pushing me away from the slow integration. I simply don’t take the easy path.

But I don’t make decisions on my gut. So let’s explore why I avoid the easy path. To do that, I need to talk about fundamental techniques and applications.

Fundamentals and Applications

In my mind, there are two categories of magick skills: Fundamentals and applications.

Applications are the things you want to do: Psychic intuition, energy healing, shielding, etc.

Fundamental techniques are the building blocks of those applications: Communication, controlling energy and connections, awakening mental muscles, and so on.

Sure, at some point, you might use psychic intuitions as the building block of some larger technique. But in general, some techniques are the end product, and others are the building blocks.

Here’s why that matters: Fundamental techniques don’t just build applications. They also build other fundamentals. If I spend 3 months learning Level 2 communication, I can then use those skills to learn Level 3 communication. But if I let the ethereal software integrate with my mind for 3 months, at the end of that time, all I have is the integrated software. I’m no closer to more advanced communication.

And so, my normal approach is to focus on fundamentals, develop them until an application becomes easy, and only then worry about that application. I thought I was already there with psychic intuitions, but I’m not. Yet.

And so, I’m going to focus on communication for the next 3-6 months. At the end of that, I expect that psychic intuitions will come easily. But more importantly, a lot of other techniques will become easier, too.

Incidentally, this is the hardest, slowest path to any particular application, but do it for a decade, and hard techniques start to become easy. Which gives me an idea for a blog or book title: “Magick the Hard Way.” Would you want to read that?

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

Debugging Psychic: Uncovering a Large Problem

Monday, October 8th, 2012

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Last month, I debugged my psychic intuitions, but said I probably wasn’t done. And indeed, I’m not: While consulting in Albany last week, I asked which ballroom dance to visit, and picked a dance that had been cancelled. Fail.

There are a few ways to approach solving this problem and developing better intuitions. You might practice until it works, which would (I think) work in this situation. Or you might find an expert, either a book or a teacher, and follow their exercises. Or, you might just give up and work on something else.

But I rarely do any of those things. I prefer to take the system apart, see all the moving parts, then reassemble them into what I want. That’s what this series is about.

Coming up, I’ll explain some results, and my overall strategy moving forward. But first, I need to explain one more ethereal software setting: Communication Level.

Ethereal Software Setting: Communication Level

Most ethereal software can communicate in several ways:

  • It can handle the entire interaction, reading your mind and dropping its response directly into your thoughts.
  • It can send you a packaged message, which you will unwrap, shift into your mind’s signature, and actively read.
  • Or it can do something in-between, handling some of those steps (unwrapping, shifting the signature, a few others), but letting you actively read the message.

I call this the “communication level.” Level 1 is where the software does everything for you, and Level 4 is where it sends a packaged message. This isn’t new — I first learned about it around 2009, while helping Lisa connect to new ethereal software for her psychic intuitions — but it’s the first time I’m using it for my own work.

I hesitate to use the word “level” in public writing, because it suggests a hierarchy. But remember, this just sets how the software communicates with you. While it is generally good to be able to communicate in the more advanced ways, in practice, it’s often better to use a lower communication level to keep things simple for yourself. The point isn’t to always use the highest-level communication, it’s to match the software’s communication level with what’s comfortable for you so you get good information.

Picking the Right Communication Level

When I set up psychic intuitions for myself, my goal was to easily receive messages while distracted. So I selected “Communication Level 1,” where the software handles the entire interaction.

While talking with the software and a trainer, I found a problem: Level 1 requires a lot of integration between the software and the receiver’s mind, and takes 3-6 months to set up properly. (That’s how long it took to set up for Lisa, anyway.) Until then, you get bad results.

Well, how about level 2? That’s also fairly easy — it sends you a message in your signature, ready to insert into your thoughts, and you just drop it there. And it only takes 1-2 days to set up (according to the ethereal software). Great! I changed that setting, and resolved to test it later.

There is a chicken-and-egg problem here: I need to communicate with the ethereal software in order to configure it, but if my communication isn’t reliable, how do I do that? My answer is, focus on the communication, rather than trying to get it working while you’re distracted. Then, verify the answers with my trainers, who can communicate with me more clearly than the ethereal software can. I’d love a better solution, but this is the best I can come up with.

Testing: A Problem

A few days later, I tested it. The procedure is simple: Ask the same question several times, read the answer with distracted communication (in this case, Level 2) and with focused communication (Level 4). And I found a large problem: Different communication levels gave different answers.

This is around the time when I realized there would be no easy answers, no quick fix, no psychic-in-a-weekend.

Now, I don’t think this is a bug in the ethereal software. I fully expect that it sent me the same answer each time, which I simply failed to read sometimes. I think this is a matter of debugging my communication techniques, or at least finding some setting I’m good at, rather than a matter of fixing the software.

But how should I communicate, and which level should I choose? I’ll explore those questions tomorrow.

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

The Solution: My Mental Muscles Act on Their Own

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

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Yesterday, I told you about my mental muscles setting up new connections to my mind without any conscious instruction. Today, I’ll tell you why it happened.

But let me start by answering Ona’s question:

I have no idea why you think it shouldn’t happen – after all all sorts of processes run unconsciously all day long

I can’t say exactly, but a few things come to mind:

  • I wasn’t expecting anything new that day. All I did was get up, use the same ethereal software I always use for manifesting, then do some non-magickal computer consulting.
  • When I felt the tingling in my head, and ruled out the common causes for that tingling, I became worried. I do occasionally get bothered by spirits, who sometimes do bizarre attacks that might feel like this.
  • I think of my mental muscles like my arm, reaching out to do magick. So it was like my arm was moving on its own. Maybe it’s the wrong metaphor, but it’s how I’ve thought about them for years.

So, I wasn’t exactly worried, but I definitely thought it was weird. Turns out, I was wrong. I called my trainers after work, and they explained:

  • My communication connections are set up better now than they were before. (“Communication connections” = The connections you use to get messages into and out of your mind.)
  • Most likely, when the ethereal software connected to my mind to set up for numbers and letters, it showed my mental muscles a more thorough procedure for setting up communication connections. My mental muscles then applied it everywhere else.
  • They verified this by looking at the software’s connections for numbers and letters, which were indeed set up better than my communication connections were before this surprising new setup, and roughly as well as my communication connections are now.
  • My trainer explained that this is fairly common, and that I simply haven’t noticed it before.

So, indeed, this isn’t the first time it’s happened, and it isn’t weird. I’m just more aware of these changes now — or my mental muscles are making larger, more noticeable changes. Either way, I learned something new, and wanted to share.

Note: Loving all the comments these days. I’m can’t respond to every comment, but I do read every one. They’re great, they make me smile, and many of them deserve an entire post in reply. I’ll get back to as many as I can as soon as I can, and please, keep commenting.

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

Debugging Psychic Intuitions (Sept 2012)

Sunday, September 23rd, 2012

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In May, I became psychic. In August, I noticed that the intuitions weren’t as reliable as I’d like. This month, I debugged it, and so far, I’m pleased with the results.

This post covers some of the more interesting results of that debugging. Each will get its own section. But let’s start with a quick review of how psychic intuitions work.

A Basic Model of Psychic Intuitions

Here’s my basic model: Psychic ethereal software reads your thoughts, monitors your actions, and sends you intuitions. Your job as the psychic is to listen to those intuitions.

In general, you can use the same software for both psychic and manifesting, since both deal with future events.

What’s the difference between the two? Psychic intuitions just come to you, while manifesting is about requesting events to happen.

What about actively requesting information? I’ll call that a psychic intuition if I’m communicating with the software like I do for other intuitions, and a manifesting if I’m communicating with it in a more elaborate way.

What to Debug?

When I notice I’m not getting the results I want, my first question is, “What could go wrong?” Here’s my list for this:

  • I could be communicating poorly, either when I ask the question, or when I receive the answer.
  • The ethereal software could be configured wrong, so that it’s not monitoring my thoughts and actions properly.
  • The ethereal software might not understand what I want, meaning is accurately guiding me to someplace I don’t want to be.
  • There could be some other error in how I’ve configured the ethereal software.
  • The ethereal software might simply not work as advertised. But I know other users (human and spirit) who are happy with it, so I consider this unlikely.

This list wasn’t strictly necessary, because I ended up just calling my trainer and asking for his advice. But I like coming in with a list of ideas — it shows them that I’m serious, and there’s sometimes a new idea on my list that they don’t normally check.

My trainer flagged 3 items to fix: Goals, communication, and the data stream.

Goals

After exchanging pleasantries, we looked at the goals I’d set up with the ethereal software. Apparently, they were awful: Vague, overly-broad, and just all around bad. This was a few weeks ago, and I blogged about it at the time.

Since then, I’ve configured my goals in the ethereal software. Some, particularly financial goals, require additional programming before the software really understands what I mean. But on the whole, they were accepted, and at the end, the software told me, “Congratulations, you are now fully configured for manifesting.” Apparently, I wasn’t before. Good to know.

It would have been nice if, when I used manifesting without setting up my goals properly, the software warned me about that. But most of the ethereal software I use is designed for ascended spirits, so it assumes you know what you’re doing, and skips a lot of error checking. The advantage is, this ethereal software gives you lots of options once you do know what you’re doing, which I like. If you know computers, it’s like Linux vs iPhone.

Better Psychic Communication

I told the ethereal software, “Guide me to be successful.” I’m not sure if that’s the full command, or if my trainer also gave it some instructions, but he told me to say that, and I trust him.

We’d expected the software to mostly use the connections it already had to my mind. Instead, it set up new connections all the day, and into the next day. It was exhausting. Advanced magick tip: If you ever do this setup, and you know how to increase the power flowing into your brain, increase it every few hours.

Based on the amount of setup, I’d say that my previous work becoming psychic used the wrong command, and didn’t trigger the ethereal software to set up the right connections to monitor my thoughts and actions. I had previously been using the same connections I normally use to communicate with other ethereal software, which only send thoughts I intend to send. These new connections should monitor my thoughts and actions throughout your day.

Now that it’s done, communication with the ethereal software has become much easier. More intuitions come to me without having to ask for them, and the messages themselves are clearer (particularly while I’m distracted). But we’re not done yet.

“Human Mage” Data Stream

This was a new concept for me, and one I never would have found without my trainer explaining it. Let me step you through it.

The psychic ethereal software gets its data from other, more complex ethereal software. By analogy, imagine an email website, like gmail. Users interact with a website (the “front-end”), but the actual data (the emails) are stored in a database (the “back-end”). I’ll use those terms: The psychic software is the front-end, and the more complex software that feeds it data is the back-end. (How do you know which is which? Users interact with the front-end.)

The back-end ethereal software sends data (events, predictions, etc) to the front-end ethereal software. Because this data flows continuously, I’ll call it a “data stream.” But there’s a problem: There’s too much data for the front-end system to handle. So, it tells the back-end system, “Only send me data relevant to humans,” or relevant to human mages, or to spirits, or ascended spirits, or something else. There were lots of options.

I was set to “skilled spirit.” No idea why. Maybe it’s the default for this software? Or maybe a former trainer set it up wrong? Maybe because I communicate like a spirit, it just treated me like a spirit in general? No idea, but I don’t really care. I just told the software to treat me like a human mage, while still communicating with me like a spirit, and it seems to be working.

Summary

Wow, I was doing a lot of things wrong. Even after fixing goals, communication and the data stream, I’m probably still doing some parts wrong — that’s why I put a date on this post. I’ll revisit this topic in a few months.

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

Mr. Black: There are No Shortcuts

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012

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

Still catching up on other blogs. A friend is visiting this week, so this is the perfect time to let other bloggers do my work for me. :)

Today: Mr. Black of The Razor’s Edge

Patience is a Virtue

A heavily-anonymized case study of a mage who became mentally unstable. Mr. Black blames that instability on learning magick without pursuing a spiritual practice, though I think that might just be correlation: Anyone who wants to pursue magick strictly for power is probably a bit unstable already, and will be more likely to work with malicious spirits and mages who promise power, to their own detriment.

The mage also tried  to “hack” the system of magick that Mr. Black practices, without first learning the basics. It didn’t work:

Anyone who has ever “hacked” anything knew the basics or fundamentals before even getting started on hacking a system.

Take Bruce Lee and his Jeet Kune Do for example;  Bruce Lee was already a martial artist before he decided to revolutionize the way we look and train in martial arts. Peter Carroll was already a magickian before Chaos Magick was created to counter the antiquity of the state of magick at that time.

I totally agree, even though I’m somewhat of a counter-example. I developed this style of magick (the one I blog about here) without learning a traditional style first, and by the time I was old enough to become initiated, I wasn’t interested. In essence, I’ve been hacking magick from the beginning.

And yet, I wouldn’t recommend it to most people. It’s slow, and difficult, and takes a long time before you get anything useful. I explored magick out of curiosity, and had a lot of luck in winding up with a good model. And even now, 20 years in, there’s still so much I don’t know.

Mr. Black’s point, I think, is that there are no shortcuts. You can’t just skip the initiation, figure magick out for yourself, and expect to save time. Hacking magick is a longcut, and a rewarding one if you want to put in the work, but it’s definitely not a shortcut.

Read Mr. Black’s full post.

Conjuration Case Study

A case study of a conjuration to get a job. Two things of particular interest:

  • Mr. Black got sick shortly after the work, and explains how he dealt with it. A request: I don’t practice your style, so I couldn’t follow all the steps you took to deal with the sickness. What’s a mala, and is there some technique to siphoning off the energy on your altar? And did you siphon energy off yourself, or just your altar?
  • The second half of the post covers a technique Mr. Black uses to check if his magick worked. This was neat to see, and seems like a generally useful technique. I’ve done similar work with energy healing, asking for psychic intuitions before the healing session to make sure I’m taking the right approach, and afterward, to make sure it worked.

Read the full post here.

To Be Continued…

Wow, Mr. Black writes a lot. I’ll finish catching up with him tomorrow.

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

Case Study: A Reader’s Failed Manifesting

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

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Yesterday, I told you about magick to find missing jewelry. What I didn’t tell you is that my reader never found her ring.

Yes, the manifesting failed. She looked for the ring, asked for guidance, looked again, and still, no ring. So, I dug into why, figuring I could either debug the ethereal software, or at least give her some advice about what to practice.

My first thought was that maybe she didn’t send the question properly — for example, maybe the software didn’t know which piece of jewelry she was looking for. Or maybe the ethereal software heard her fine, but wasn’t doing the manifesting properly. Or maybe it wasn’t delivering the results to her mind properly. I could solve any of those problems, but I had to know which it was first.

I connected to the ethereal software, asked it for the list of users (remember, I own my book’s ethereal software, so I have access to everything it does), and found her requests. The messages themselves were quite clear, and the software confirmed that it knew what she wanted. The problem, it said, was that her ring was not “within her zone of control,” which I took to mean that it’s not in her house. That is, she lost it somewhere around town, not anywhere she can find simply by looking.

Manifesting works by selecting a sequence of events that will lead to the desired outcome. But, if there is no such sequence of events — or if the sequence is so unlikely that the ethereal software can’t make it happen — then you don’t get any result. Which was the case here. The software tried to tell her that, but she’s not set up to receive conscious messages, so it just failed silently.

Failing silently is the default for most magick. You do your ritual or visualization, then you wait for the results. I don’t know of any style that tells you immediately whether the magick worked or not. So, this is no worse than any other style. But it’s no better, either, and frankly, failing silently is bad form, and it’s something we should change.

I’m telling you this for a few reasons. First, so you can see some of the challenges in developing user-friendly magick. Second, to give you an example of why manifestings sometimes fails, to help you debug your own magick. And third, so I have something to refer back to when I eventually get my ethereal software to stop failing silently.

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

Troubleshooting Your Magick: Are You Using the Right Software?

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

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Last week, Lisa told me that her self-healing technique wasn’t working anymore. The energy we designed to reduce the itching of her hives, along with other healing techniques for her back, weren’t having any noticeable results. She asked me what was going on.

I watched as she tried the techniques. She contacted some ethereal software, and sent it a message. (I followed her connection to the ethereal software, and could see the message, though I didn’t read it myself.) So, nothing fundamentally flawed in her approach.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that she forgot the actual commands for the software, since we wrote them down. And her psychic intuitions were still working just fine, which meant that her communication was probably working, too.

But she was sending that message to the wrong ethereal software. I could see when I connected to the proper healing software she uses, and compared their fractal signatures. She’d taken a couple weeks off from healing work, and when she went to contact the ethereal software again, she misremembered its signature, and connected to the wrong software.

The fix was incredibly easy. She’d initially found the software by asking her psychic ethereal software to recommend something for energy healing. So she did that again, sent the same messages to the correct software, and now her healing techniques are working.

I’m telling you this for two reasons. One, this will probably happen to you at some point. It’s certainly happened to me. And two, because I’m realizing that we need some way to make sure the ethereal software we’re using is actually suited to the task we’re using it for. I’ll have more stories on that coming up.

And three, because this experience is one of the things that makes me confident in my model, since it only makes sense if ethereal software is a real, external thing, rather than a hypothetical idea that simply focuses intent.

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