Posts Tagged ‘Definitions’

Glossary of Direct Magick

Monday, June 2nd, 2014

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

This chapter covers Direct Magick’s terminology, along with the major moving parts of magick.

Most systems have terms for these same moving parts, because we’re all working with the same forces. I’ll note corresponding terms as we go. Think of them as near-synonyms, like how “novelist,” “author,” and “journalist” all describe a person who writes, but with subtle differences in meaning.

Ethereal Muscles

The parts of your mind that drive magick. Engaging them makes the difference between imagining vs doing magick, like how engaging your leg muscles makes the difference between imagining vs actually walking.

Other systems call these the unconscious.

Ethereal Software

The external forces that mages channel. You pick one, tell it your intent, and it handles the details. Kind of like using Google — you tell it what you want, it handles the details.

Chaos Magick calls these forces egregores. Reiki healers and psychics call the force they use The Universe.

Spirits

Spirits are intelligent entities, like people without bodies. We sometimes ask them for help or training.

Many systems of magick use spirit in this way.

Note: Spirits are not ghosts. While Direct Magick is compatible with ghosts, ghosts are not part of Direct Magick.

Energy

Energy is one of the basic building blocks of magick. It makes magickal structures do work. Most people first encounter energy during an energy meditation — it’s what makes your skin tingle.

Many systems use energy in this way. Similar terms include prana and chi / ki / qi.

Note: Magickal energy makes magickal structures do work. It doesn’t make objects move or make cells grow. Don’t confuse it with the “energy” of physics or biology.

Energy Signature

The type of energy. It determines what the energy does. For example, we’d use one signature in energy healing for an inflamed knee, and a different signature to create pleasure in the body.

Synonyms: Energy frequency and color.

Connection

Another of magick’s basic building blocks. Connections carry energy. They’re used for energy healing, shielding, and many other techniques.

Structure

A catch-all term for “stable magickal matter.” Basically, everything here besides energy.

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What is Direct Magick?

Wednesday, May 28th, 2014

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

Magick comes from the mind, usually the unconscious. You can guide your unconscious with symbols, like in rituals, runes, and visualizations. You can guide it with temporary beliefs, like in Chaos Magick. And you can find other methods, too, like self-hypnosis.

Direct magick takes a new approach: We make those magick-driving parts conscious. It’s like using biofeedback to control your heartbeat.

Guiding magick consciously feels like moving your hand. When you type, you’re not visualizing your fingers, or believing you’ll press a key, you’re just typing. You think about your intent, but also about spelling, paragraphs, and metaphors. You feel the keys, the resistance as you press. You notice if a key sticks, and adjust for it. You can even learn to touch type, consciously guiding your fingers through new motions until they become automatic and unconscious. That’s what Direct Magick is like, only with connections and energy instead of a keyboard.

Other Features of Direct Magick

No Rituals: While compatible with ritual systems, Direct Magick itself doesn’t teach any rituals.

No Prescribed Religion: Like the sciences, Direct Magick is silent on matters of religion and spirituality. You can follow any path that speaks to you.

Works with Other Systems: You can practice other systems of magick alongside Direct Magick. Becoming more aware of the magick-driving parts of your mind might even help your other practices.

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What is Magick?

Monday, May 19th, 2014

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

A man goes to a Reiki healer. She listens, calms him, and channels energy. His pain decreases for a few days.

A woman does a ritual to find a better job, then sends out her resume. A few days later, her interviewer happens to be in a good mood, and she gets hired.

A man is about to cross the street, but feels a tingling in his head, like a hundred people staring at him. He pauses as a car runs the red light, almost hitting him.

Energy healing, manifesting, and psychic intuitions. These are the main domains of magick.

Real Magick = Real Change

It’s tempting to water magick down until it’s socially acceptable. “I don’t know if that healing result was placebo or real energy, but isn’t it wonderful that the man feels better?” Or, “Maybe the woman’s ritual simply gave her the confidence to keep interviewing, but her intention was fulfilled, so that’s a success.” That vagueness feels safe.

But if we do that, we’re talking about placebo and psychology, not magick.

So let me be clear: Magick is not placebo, and it is not suggestion. It is not about positive thinking or changing your perceptions. Real magick changes the external world.

(Many things we call magick, though, are placebo and suggestion, not real magick. We’ll talk about how to tell the difference later in this book.)

Why Magick?

I study magick because of what it can become:

  • Energy seems to influence cells, especially nerves. If we could affect nerves more strongly and precisely, how might we help depression, epilepsy, or paralysis?
  • When you do a ritual, some force influences events on your behalf. How does it alter the physical world? What problems could we solve if we understood that mechanism?
  • Instead of auto accidents, what if psychics could predict natural disasters, famines, and wars? How many people could we help with that information?

No one can do those things yet. But if building magick into a science lets us do even one of them, it’s worth doing.

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The Major Moving Pieces: Energy, Connections, and Other Common Terms

Friday, August 30th, 2013

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

Direct magick also borrows a few terms from other traditions:

Energy

Energy is widely used to refer to “that thing that makes you feel tingly.” I use it the same way. Later, we’ll make a proper definition, but hopefully you know what I mean at this point.

(Prana and chi / ki / qi are other terms for the same external phenomenon.)

Note that the word “energy” has different meanings in other fields. Physicists mean “the ability to do work,” biologists mean “fuel that makes cells move,” and advertisers mean “excitement.” Each profession is using the word to describe a different, largely-unrelated phenomenon. When reasoning about magickal energy, be careful not to assume our energy behaves like other types of energy; more often than not, it operates differently than other phenomena that happen to share its name.

Energy Signature

We use different energy for working with an inflamed knee than to calm a person or create pleasant sensations during sex. I call the energy’s type its signature. (Other writers call it frequency or color, which, once again, all describe the same phenomenon.)

We’ll explore just how different energies are different later. For now, just know that signature = type, that there are distinct signatures of energy used for different results, and that experienced mages can recognize and remember different signatures.

Connection

A connection is a small magickal structure that connects two points, allowing energy to flow between them. For example, when doing healing work, you’ll make a connection between your hand and the energy of the injured tissue.

In Part 2, we’ll learn to make connections, and later, we’ll learn to create shielding by closing and blocking connections.

Path

A path is a series of connections, for example, going from your hand to the air to a person’s skin and ultimately to their injured tissue. We’ll talk more about paths and connections in Book 3. For now, just treat them as synonyms.

Structure

Structure is a catch-all term for any stable, lasting magickal thing, kind of like how “matter” is a catch-all for any ordinary physical thing. Everything we’ve talked about, other than energy, is a structure.

Spirit

A spirit is basically a human mage without a body. They are sentient and intelligent, (though some are more animalistic than human, really). Some spirits are roughly as skilled as an intermediate human mage, while others are vastly more capable than any human I’ve met. Like humans, some are friendly, many are interested in their own benefits, and a few are malicious.

Note: Don’t confuse spirits with ghosts. Spirits do not appear to come from humans, but seem to have been “born” as spirits. (Ghosts are not something I work with or include in Direct Magick.)

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The Major Moving Pieces: Ethereal Muscles

Wednesday, August 28th, 2013

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

Just as most systems of magick use external forces, most systems have techniques to engage the internal parts of a person’s mind that drive magick, ranging from ritual to trance to simply believing your magick will work. The point is simple: Communicate your intent to your unconscious, where those magick-driving parts live, and let them contact the ethereal software or do whatever else they do to make that intent happen. Many systems simply call those parts, “the unconscious,” while silently acknowledging that there are other parts of the unconscious that aren’t responsible for magick.

In direct magick, we learn to make those magick-driving parts of the mind conscious, which lets us watch them as they work, and guide them through new techniques. And, since they aren’t unconscious anymore — and, as it turns out, they behave quite differently than the rest of the unconscious mind — we need a new term: Ethereal muscles.

Think about it this way: Engaging your leg muscles makes the difference between imagining moving vs actually walking. Engaging your ethereal muscles makes the difference between imagining a change vs actually causing it. Like your ordinary muscles, you can strengthen ethereal muscles with exercise, and like all your muscles, if you genuinely believe they won’t work, you probably won’t be able to move them. (Ever seen someone hypnotized to believe their legs are limp? Exactly.)

While ethereal software does the complex work to make magick happen, ethereal muscles are what turns a thought in your brain into the first movements of magick, contacting the ethereal software and otherwise starting the process. Unlike ethereal software, which many people share, each person has their own ethereal muscles. I can’t use yours, and you can’t use mine.

Having worked with ethereal muscles for over a decade, it turns out, they’re not part of the brain. They are ethereal structures themselves, like energy or spirits, not ordinary physical matter like cells. We can connect them to different parts of the brain: Visual areas (to see auras), auditory areas (to hear messages), and areas for conscious thought (to consciously direct the ethereal muscles). We can also use magick to awaken hibernating ethereal muscles, and to strengthen atrophied ones.

(Note that, in my writing, “mind” refers to all of a person’s cognitive functions, including ethereal muscles, while “brain” refers specifically to their nerve cells.)

In this book, we’ll learn to engage our ethereal muscles and use them to contact ethereal software. In Book 2, we’ll learn to use our ethereal muscles to improve the results from that software, and in Book 3, we’ll learn to do magick using only our muscles (without any software), which is useful for building new techniques that your software doesn’t understand yet.

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The Major Moving Pieces: Ethereal Software

Friday, August 2nd, 2013

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

In the second question, “What Turns Intent into Change in the World?” we saw that magick requires some external, complex force to handle the details, at least when we’re doing magick quickly for large problems. My term for any of those forces is ethereal software.

I’m not the only one to notice these external forces. Energy healers and psychics channel them for energy and information, calling them “The Universe.” Chaos Magicians call them “egregores,” based on a view that those forces are created and powered by human beliefs. All these terms refer to the same external objects, with different explanations attached.

In my experience, all these forces share some common properties, which lead me to call them “ethereal software”:

  • Different forces are specialized for different purposes. I use different forces for energy healing vs psychic information, for example. And different psychic forces specialize in different types of information (say, accidents vs jobs vs medicine), so I’ve been able to help friends develop intuitions about a new type of information by changing which force they were channeling.
  • Every one of these forces I’ve encountered recognizes the command, “Connect me to the spirits who made you.” Some of them require the spirits to approve your request, but all of them have it, meaning each force was created (or programmed) by spirits. In my experience, these forces derive their power from (1) the programming these spirits provide, and (2) a power source these spirits provide. Human belief seems irrelevant to this process, and I’ve had great results with forces unrelated to popular memes or ideas.
  • With the permission of the spirits who made a particular force, you can change how it responds to your commands. For example, when doing a healing session for a friend with hives, I started by asking for what I wanted: “Heal her hives.” It sent energy to her nerves to reduce the itch signal, which gave poor results. But from modern medicine, we knew the real problem was her immune system becoming over-active and attacking her skin, so we re-programmed the force to also mildly reduce her immune sensitivity*. The re-programmed command worked well, where the original command failed.

*There were a few other steps to the healing technique. For details, see Case Study: Healing for Chronic Hives on magickofthought.com/books.

So, I call these forces “ethereal software” to suggest that (1) there are multiple pieces of software, and choosing the right piece will give you better results; (2) we can explore and eventually understand how they operate, particularly by talking to the programmers; and (3) we can re-program these forces to improve their effectiveness. Again, suggesting that mages channel external forces is nothing new, I’m just proposing a new metaphor that I find is particularly useful for exploring how those forces act on our instructions to cause change in the world.

Metaphors can also have unintended connotations. A friend thought channeling ethereal software would feel like using Windows, or Excel. It does not. Most of the time, using ethereal software simply feels like thinking, though we will learn to use it consciously so we can refine our techniques and improve our results.

Why doesn’t using this complex force feel like anything? Well, think about what’s required to transmit the thoughts in your brain to this external force. Or, to make it more concrete, think about what would be required to transmit your thoughts to a computer: It would have to monitor your brain’s activity, recognizing which nerves are firing when, and decode that activity into a message. That’s rather complex, and it’s not the kind of thing a new* mage could do themselves, or do quickly. So the external force handles those details, reading your thoughts and dropping its replies into your mind. You just think, and subjectively, it feels like focusing on your intent, and like information simply appears in your thoughts.

*It may sound like no human could do that at all. It turns out, you can create ethereal structures in the brain which simplify this communication process, so you can guide it yourself, improving the detail of your communication. We won’t get to that in this Initiation, but we will cover some techniques you can use to improve your software’s ability to communicate with you in this book and the next one.

We’ll use ethereal software extensively throughout this Initiation, and in Part 2, I’ll show you how to connect to a piece of ethereal software I designed for this book.

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Ethereal Muscles

Friday, June 7th, 2013

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Does the term “mental muscles” make you think of a part of the brain?

I was explaining my research into erotic energy last night, and a friend told me she thought “mental muscles” were part of the brain. The word “mental” suggested it: Mental = mind, and mind = brain, at least for her. But when I say “mental muscles,” I mean magickal structures that connect to the brain, but are not themselves part of the brain. They don’t take up space, and you can’t point to them on an MRI. So, something quite different than the concept that my term, “mental muscles,” conjured up in her mind.

I can see where she’s coming from, and I’d like my terms to conjure up the right concept for as many people as possible. She suggested “astral muscles” or “spirit muscles,” and I’m thinking of the term “ethereal muscles.” First, “ethereal” isn’t tied to one particular school of thought, and second, it sounds natural to say, “You engage your ethereal muscles to send a message to ethereal software.” And, since I’m still working on my book, now is a good time to get my terms straight.

But I want to hear from you, dear readers. Does the term “mental muscles” make you think of a part of the brain? And how do you react to “ethereal muscles” and the other terms?

Thanks!

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What is Direct Magick?

Monday, December 17th, 2012

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This is part of An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

Direct magick is about consciously building new magick techniques. It has three core steps:

  • Understand the mechanism that creates the change in the external world — the steps that happen after the ritual.
  • Trigger that mechanism directly, without rituals or symbols.
  • Take that mechanism apart, then use those parts to build new techniques.

Direct magick comes from my need to understand how magick works, and my belief that magick can do vastly more than we can do today, but only if we build those capabilities ourselves. I want to build magick into a modern science, and I hope you’ll join me.

In this book, we’ll focus on awakening the parts of your mind that drive magick (your “ethereal muscles”), connecting you to an external force you can channel for help with magick (some “ethereal software”), and learning to use that force for a few easy, useful techniques.

Next book, we’ll dive into the mechanism, and taking apart some of the techniques you’re learning in this book, and showing you how to customize them to a particular situation to get better results. And in the third book, we’ll take some of the techniques apart, show you how they’re built, and show you how to rebuild those parts into new, useful techniques.

You can use direct magick with a style you already know, or use direct magick as your only style. You can learn just the easy techniques, use them for as long as you like, and decide later on learning how they work and how to customize them. And if you want, you can apply this to other magick you know, taking it apart to customize it or rebuild it into something new, too.

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What is Magick?

Friday, December 14th, 2012

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This is an outdated book chapter. See the latest version here: An Initiation into Direct Magick – Book 1.

What is magick? My real answer is, “The study of ethereal muscles, ethereal software, and other magickal structures.” But those are my terms, coined as I explored direct magick. Let’s start with a layman’s definition.

For now, let’s say that magick is “altering the world through thought.” That isn’t 100% accurate: Some magick requires rituals or symbols in addition to thought, as we’ll see midway through this book. And psychic intuitions are part of magick, but they don’t alter the world. So it’s not a perfect definition. But hopefully, it gives you some idea of what we’ll be doing.

Most of the practical magick I see falls into two categories: Manifesting and energy healing. There’s more to magick — we’ll explore spirits, protection, personal growth / enlightenment, and more in these books — but you’ll probably use your magick primarily for manifesting and healing.

Manifesting is about influencing events: You manifest a job, and the HR person happens to be in a good mood when they look at your resume. Or you manifest a relationship, then feel drawn to a particular nightclub, where you hit it off with a new friend. Essentially, creating luck, though it can only do so much — you won’t get a job you’re unqualified for, and reading this book won’t make you win the lottery. Sorry.

(Psychic intuitions are a subtype of manifesting, employing many of the same techniques. We’ll explore psychic intuitions in Book 2.)

Energy healing is about reducing pain and speeding recovery. Examples include Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and other styles of energy healing. They all operate via magickal structures, so I include them in magick, even if their practitioners don’t use the word. Learning magick will help you work with those structures, and help you get better healing results.

We’ll explore both energy healing and manifesting in Part 3 of this book.

I also want to be clear about two things magick isn’t. First, real magick won’t let you throw fireballs, teleport, or turn into a bat. That’s only in movies.

Second, some people underestimate magick, imagining that manifesting equals positive thinking. (“Believe you’ll find a great job, and you’ll keep looking until you do.”) Positive thinking is great, but it’s not magick. Real magick changes the external world, not just your perception of it. And real energy healing does more than placebo, and works even if the client doesn’t believe in energy healing, or doesn’t know you did the healing technique for them.

(What about internal magick for personal growth? We’ll do that, too, though it’s hard to separate placebo from legit magick. See Book 2 for more.)

One more thing: Magick is hard. Anyone who tells you it’s easy is selling positive thinking and placebo, not real magick. Expect to spend a few months becoming a serious beginner, and a few years becoming skilled in one area (like manifesting). It’s worth the effort, but it’s not easy.

Still here? Good. Let’s talk about direct magick.

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Words Divide Us

Friday, August 31st, 2012

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A friend recently told me she believes in faeries.

She’s a doctor, loves science, and I thoroughly respect her mind. And yet… faeries? I didn’t say anything, but I worried.

After a few more conversations, I realized that she simply meant “Non-physical sentient beings that can interact with psychic or otherwise magickal people.” In other words, spirits.

Vocabulary choices can divide people who otherwise agree. Faeries vs spirits. Raising someone’s vibration vs adjusting a tendon’s signature. (I’m also thinking about Yvonne today, who I hope is doing well on her own journey.)

I don’t mean to say terms aren’t important. They are, because their metaphors impact the questions we ask and the models we explore. And yet, I’m realizing that I evaluate terms based on social groups, categorizing the speaker as a new ager or psychic or fluffy or ritual mage or … And realizing that categorizing like that probably isn’t the best, most productive response when meeting someone new.

I don’t have an answer. But I think this is an important question. Please weigh in in the comments.

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