Posts Tagged ‘My Work This Week’

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Enhanced Cognition via Advanced Energy Techniques

Sunday, April 9th, 2017

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Ten years ago, I began creating energy structures in my mind to enhance how I think. Last year, I developed a new, better version of the technique. Last week, I returned to that work.

When I engage these energy structures, my mind becomes faster and more focused. I can hold more ideas and threads in my thoughts at once. Insights come more easily and carry me farther. And I become more aware of my will and feelings, and more able to articulate my thoughts.

This all started around a decade ago, working with my mind’s semi-conscious areas. The term is my own, but the concept is common in personal growth classes: We have these thoughts just below the surface, tugging at our attention without quite being acknowledged. Often, they arose in childhood, and don’t work in the adult world, and we’re encouraged to acknowledge that part of ourselves, listen to it, and help it adjust to the adult world. I liked the idea, and set out to create an energy technique to help that adjustment happen faster.

My idea was to create an energy pathway between my conscious adult mind and the part of my mind responsible for those semi-conscious patterns. I found the semi-conscious area by focusing on those thoughts and feeling which part of my mind engaged, then I found an inactive energy pathway and energized it. With that pathway in place, it became easier to engage the semi-conscious pattern, to listen to it and explain the adult world to it, to update it to be an ally rather than a hindrance. I even found that I didn’t have to be fully conscious of that updating, that (after creating the energy pathway) those semi-conscious patterns would update all on their own. I called the technique consciousness integration, and used it for several years.

(If I were reading this post, I’d be wondering how much of that was placebo. The simple answer is, I have no way of knowing. But I found many benefits, and always felt my efforts were worthwhile.)

Last year, I developed a second version of consciousness integration. I’d been connecting my ethereal muscles to my mind, helping them read my intent and send me information more precisely. I did this by creating networks of connections to allow my ethereal muscles to read and write energy signatures to specific points in my mind. And I thought about my consciousness integration work, creating those pathways from semi-conscious areas to my conscious mind. What if I created some of these networks throughout those semi-conscious areas? Then instead of connecting a single semi-conscious reaction to my conscious mind, I could just connect them all at once, updating them all together instead of one at a time.

It took around a week to complete those networks. I happened to be talking with a spirit when I first activated them, and the energy they provided felt like a wind howling in my mind. It was amazing but useless — I became alert but unfocused, thinking quickly but without direction. The reason was simple: I had about 10x the power I needed. But after I turned the power down, and then down some more, it became wonderful, and I found I could focus more easily, think more clearly, and engage my ethereal muscles more smoothly. Since then, it’s become a staple of my practice, something I use so often that I forget it’s an addition to my mind.

In the past few months, I’ve been connecting some new ethereal muscles to my mind, and gotten better at making those networks. So now I’m returning to consciousness integration, doing the same technique on even more of my mind. So far I’m excited about the results: My mind is becoming even faster and more focused, and I notice improvements in my ability to explain ideas, verbally and in writing. I can also hold more ideas and threads in my thoughts at once when I engage the consciousness integration energy networks, and insights come more easily and carry me farther. I’m about halfway done creating the networks for this round, and I’m eager to see what happens when they’re complete.

A couple of notes:

I’ve used the term mind loosely in this post. Specifically, I’m talking about my brain’s interface layer. This is an energetic structure that sits on top of my brain’s energy layers, serving as an interface for communication with my ethereal muscles, ethereal software, and spirits. When I connect my ethereal muscles to my mind, I’m specifically connecting them to this interface layer, and when I create new pathways in my mind, they’re specifically in this interface layer. When I talk with spirits, they refer to this interface layer as thinking mind, and I’ve used that term in some past writing.

Second, this really is advanced work. It requires many other techniques to do properly. Please don’t try this at home unless you have experience working specifically with your mind’s interface layer and can convert my hand-waving explanations into concrete techniques you know and understand. I started working with my mind very slowly, making tiny changes, and so should you. If you do try any of this, it’s at your own risk.

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

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What I’m Learning from Creating Sensations with Energy

Monday, March 13th, 2017

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I’m developing energy techniques to create obvious sensations, both to demonstrate that energy is real (to clients, to skeptics, to myself), and as a measurable task to focus on as I develop my skills. This post is about that testing and what I learned last week as I tested variations of the technique.

I’m using the same exercise as at the Energy Geek Meetup last month: Blindfold your partner (or just have them face away from you), send energy to either their head or their hips, verify that they feel the energy where you were sending it. I lay out the details here.

For years, I’ve known I should test my techniques, make sure each is working so I can confidently build on it. But I’ve felt such resistance, such fear of failing, that I’ve rarely done good testing. But actually testing and improving my techniques feels amazing. (Most of this post is technical, not narrative, so the excitement probably doesn’t show all the time. But I’m quite excited.)

In this most recent testing last week, I varied two aspects of the technique: Where in my aura I built the energy, and how open my shields were. My notes are below.

Aura: Use Deeper Layers

The energy around the body isn’t one uniform thing. It has layers. You can think of them as going out from the body, though to really grasp these layers you need to think in 4 dimensions.

A great deal of my work in the past decade has focused on accessing deeper layers of the aura (or biofield). It seems that changes to the deeper layers are more powerful: When I do a healing session, the deeper I go in their energy field, the faster and more pronounced the results are. So these deeper layers are a prime candidate to test when developing any energy technique.

I tested building energy in two layers: One superficial, which is the default layer that engages when I think about building energy; and one deep, the layer I normally focus on in healing sessions, that requires extra effort to engage.

I tested the superficial energy first. Didn’t work. We tried it 2 times, the receiver got both wrong. I hadn’t expected the superficial energy to work, so I took that as confirmation and moved on. (I’m assuming the sensations were placebo.)

Then I tested deeper energy 8 times. The receiver got 6 correct, 1 incorrect, and 1 where she didn’t feel anything. She also felt the sensations much quicker, and somewhat more strongly, than with the superficial energy’s placebo sensations. Good results.

A little statistics: Let’s discard the time when the receiver didn’t feel anything, and just focus on correct vs incorrect. She was correct 6/7 times. Since each guess is 50/50, you’d expect her to get about half correct by random chance. To get 6 out of 7 correct is about a 10% chance (math below). That’s good enough for a psychology paper, and it’s good enough for me too (for now).

Math: Here’s how I ballpark the stats in my head: If she went 6/6, that would be a 1 in 64 chance (2^6 = 64). But she went 6/7. There are 7 possible ways to get 6/7 correct (any one of the trials could be incorrect), so doing that is a 7 in 64 chance, or about 10%. (If anyone has better math, please leave a comment.)

So that’s my first result: Superficial energy is relatively ineffective at producing sensations. Deeper energy is much more effective. (I’m meeting with another friend next week to replicate these results.)

Shielding: Fully Open

Shielding blocks energy. I normally have shielding up, so I don’t pick up energy from the people near me.

It turns out, shielding also blocks the energy I build in my body. That was the finding from the last Energy Geek Meetup, when I forgot to open my shielding and couldn’t get the demo to work.

For the testing above, I fully opened my shields, so my energy could flow out. But I had an idea: What if I shield my body, but open my shielding around my hand? Could that help my receiver be even more accurate, since they would only receive energy from my hand, and not get any ambient energy from the rest of my body?

To test it, I closed my shield, then connected to my right arm and focused on opening my shielding there. This was my first time doing this, shielding only part of my body, so it’s possible I made a mistake here, but my body’s shielding still felt closed even as my arm felt open.

Then I built energy throughout my body (using the deeper layer energy) and sent it to my hand. It felt odd, like my energy had to find new paths from my abdomen to my hand, like the paths it normally took were blocked. What gives? Shielding goes around my body, not inside it, so it shouldn’t block my own energy within my body.

I’m not sure what was happening. Maybe the energy takes a straight-line path through the air to my hand? Maybe it flows over the surface of my body, rather than inside it? I have more exploration to do, but this showed me there’s something I don’t understand about how energy flows from one part of the body to another.

We did 2 tests like this, with my shield only open near my right hand. She got both wrong. I took that to mean that partially opening shields doesn’t work. (Maybe I can solve this once I understand what happened, but it’s low priority.)

So that’s the second result: It seems to be necessary to fully open my shielding in order to send energy effectively.

Finding My Calling

Talking about this work feels different. Better. More concrete than other work I’ve done. I had expected it to be hard, but actually it was easy. The exercises in this post took about 15 minutes to do.

Now that I’m started testing techniques, I’m excited to test (and improve) sensory connections, communication with spirits, and all the other work I do.

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

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How I Engineer New Techniques: Erotic Energy

Sunday, May 22nd, 2016

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

Instead of visualizing my intent or performing a ritual, I engineer techniques. This is one of the core practices of Direct Magick and Direct Biofield Healing, and one of the keys to solving new problems with those systems. But what does it mean to “engineer” a technique?

Today, I want to share a concrete example of engineering a technique.

In March, I had an unexpected success with erotic energy, and found a new ethereal muscle responsible for it. The muscle was engaging automatically, which sounds good but is actually a problem: It would engage when I was turned on in the right way, visualizing the right thing, breathing just so… It was great when it happened, but it wasn’t reliable. I wanted to solve that, and also learn to harness this type of energy to create other sensations for healing techniques and demonstrations.

I connected that new muscle to my other ethereal muscles, and updated its connections to my brain, so I could engage it consciously, at will. There’s a whole other set of techniques I developed in my 20s for doing that, it could be its own series, but today we’re going to focus on what happened after I made that new muscle conscious: It would still create the right type of energy, but instead of creating it throughout my body, it only created it in a small region of my chest.

Why my chest? Really, it would create that energy in whatever parts of my body I connected to. But connecting to a part of the body isn’t as simple as thinking about it. When I connect to my knee, for example, I create a bunch of sensory connections to the tendons, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and other tissues in my knee, and to all of the different ethereal structures that carry energy from my cells to my aura*. If I connect to a part of my body in that way, the new muscle will build energy there. And by default, if it don’t connect anywhere, it works on a small region of my chest.

*I used to call this my “energy layer.” The term “aura” is imprecise, but I’m using it to reduce the amount of jargon and make this easier to connect to.

In March, I couldn’t connect to my whole body like that. I couldn’t even connect to all those ethereal structures in my knee, not all at the same time. It felt deeply intimidating, and I distracted myself for two weeks.

In April, consulting in Singapore, I started practicing these connections. I started with one ethereal structure — that means a single step along the path from my aura to my cells. I connected to that structure in my chest, then found the same structure (the same step in the path from aura to cells) in a nearby part of my chest, then a bit farther over, until it was in my shoulder, arms, and hands, and up to my head, and down to my stomach and legs. I wasn’t thinking about the parts of my body, but instead connecting to the ethereal structures, finding similar structures adjacent to them, and only then putting a little energy in those structures and noticing where in my body I felt the energy.

When I couldn’t find any new parts of that structure, I knew I was at a boundary — my fingertips, the top of my head, etc. I don’t think I reached any of those boundaries the first day. My mind and ethereal muscles were exhausted after connecting to a few regions of my chest and arms, but that was ok. The point wasn’t to solve the entire problem in a day. The point was to develop a procedure: Connect to one structure at one point, find similar structures nearby, repeat until you get to a boundary. That was something repetitive, an algorithm, which I could practice until it was unconscious. I found that solution, practiced until I was exhausted, then rested, then did it again the next day. Slowly, my ethereal muscles learned to do those steps without being consciously guided.

I did that every morning on the train to work. The third day, I connected to my entire body (for that single structure). The fourth through sixth days I repeated the task, taking smaller steps when I found nearby areas, getting a higher-resolution image of my body. The following week I added other structures, going up to my aura, or down toward cells, just like I do for healing techniques. (“Up” and “down” are metaphors, I discuss what they mean here.)

By the end of the month, I could connect throughout my body to the four main ethereal structures I use. It took about a minute, and no longer exhausted me. At that point, “connect to my whole body” became a single action, a basic technique I could use in building other, more complex techniques, such as “connect to my entire body, build this type of erotic energy, then share it in this way.”

That’s what engineering a technique looks like: Taking something I cannot do, creating a series of simple steps to achieve it, then practicing those steps until they become natural and automatic.

I realized two things in writing this post:

First, did you notice steps like, “connect to the same structure in an adjacent area,” that sound conceptually simple but aren’t precisely defined? That’s because finding an adjacent structure to see where it goes is itself a technique. Several techniques, actually — an initial version, then an improved version, then improved again. Developing each version was similar to what I laid out in this post: A series of simple steps I trained my ethereal muscles to do. In most posts, I gloss over techniques like this, but today I wanted to call it out.

Second: The process of developing Direct Magick was the process of training my ethereal muscles to do new techniques, practicing them until they’re automatic and unconscious, then using those techniques as the building blocks for the next technique. Month after month, each technique building on the ones that came before. I’ve been working with energy and magick for 25 years, and engineering techniques for around 15 of those years. At one per month, that’s roughly 200 techniques. That’s what’s involved in teaching this system. Sometimes it feels overwhelming to teach Direct Magick, but seeing the actual scope, this feels doable.

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Cancer and Multiple Sclerosis: Initial Healing Sessions (My Work January 2015)

Sunday, February 1st, 2015

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

I’m developing healing techniques for my friend with cancer, and a new friend with multiple sclerosis.

This month, I learned to work with the affected tissues, and did an initial healing session on both.

This post covers my initial observations and ideas.

Energy Healing for Cancer

When I visited in December, I’d done everything I could to help with Lisa’s infections and increase her comfort.

In January, I asked: If I were taking full responsibility for developing healing techniques for her, what else would I do?

Well, instead of getting a spirit who knows how to use the healing ethereal software, I’d get one of the spirits who made that software.

I asked my mentor, and he made an introduction.

Drawing from Lisa’s medical knowledge and the spirit’s healing expertise, we wound up with three healings, intended to:

  • Increase productivity of her bone marrow. (Bone marrow produces both red and white blood cells).
  • Increase productivity of her lymph nodes. (T cells are a type of white blood cell, particularly good at fighting cancer. They spend part of their life cycle in lymph nodes.)
  • Decrease hormone productivity of the cancer cells. (Cancer cells produce hormone-like chemicals called “cytokines” that interfere with the immune system.)

The spirit did most of the energy work. I connected him to Lisa’s cancer cells, and he programmed the ethereal software to recognize their energy. I told him about bone marrow and lymph nodes, connected him to the tissue, and he did the energy adjustments. I explained cytokines, and he figured out the rest. I was a translator between him and Lisa, connecting the medical expertise to the spirit.

Lymphocyte levels are the key metric here. That’s the measure of the white blood cells that go through the lymph nodes, which includes the T cells. Here’s the data:

  • Normal value is between 16 and 47.
  • In the month before the healing session, her lymphocytes were between 6 and 11.
  • Two days before the healing session, they were at 7.
  • The day after the healing session, they were up to 15.

We’re both excited about those results.

There’s no lab result that tells us about cytokine levels. But I’ll be out to visit again in a few weeks, and we’ll see how she’s doing then.

(And to follow up on the anti-infection healing technique from my December visit: In the week after the healing session, her urine production increased 20%, which is associated with reduced inflammation and infection.)

Energy Healing for Multiple Sclerosis

Background: MS is an autoimmune disease. The person’s immune system attacks their nerves. In the past, I’ve worked with chronic hives (another autoimmune disorder), so I’m drawing from that.

When I connect to a person, I lightly touch their body and connect to the energy of their skin, then their muscles, tendons, and other tissues. When I connected to the energy of her skin, I noticed an unusual signature, one I hadn’t seen before.

I found that unusual signature in most of her body. It is not present in areas where her MS is in remission, and it is more pronounced in areas where her symptoms are more severe.

When I look for a normal nerve signature, I do not find it. So I think that unusual signature is from her nerves.

I had expected to find a normal nerve signature in the areas that are in remission, but I don’t. I mentally subtract “inflammation” from the unusual signature, and I find that “unusual-minus-inflammation” signature is in the areas that are in remission.

It seems that nerves in remission are still different than nerves in a person without MS. Or they produce a different signature, at least. Which is good, it suggests we can develop a healing technique by shifting the nerves toward the “in remission” signature, rather than needing to go all the way to “normal, non-MS-suffering” signature.

My first thought: Let’s do a standard healing intended to reduce inflammation, adjusted to target her nerves (with their unusual signature). The answer is probably more complex, but it seems silly to jump to a complex technique without trying the basics first.

I’ve had two sessions with this client so far. Session one, I explored these signatures and got used to connecting to her nerves. Session two, I did the anti-inflammation technique. We’ll see how it goes.

I also applied the sleep effect I developed last month. The week after applying it, she had levels of work-related stress that would normally give her insomnia, but she was instead able to sleep about 6 hours a night.

Medical disclaimer: This post describes the intent behind the healings, and does not make any claim as to the efficacy of the healings themselves.

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

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Spirituality for an Athiest Rationalist (My Work January 1-9)

Sunday, January 11th, 2015

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Two friends were praising flexible beliefs. Seeing a storm or a bird as a sign. Believing in karma, since there’s no way to know it’s false. Drawing a tarot card, and believing it was meant specifically for you.

If you’ve been here long, you know I’m not spiritual. Science and rationality, Bayesian atheism with a belief in spirits-as-artificial-intelligences, that’s where I live. My friends and I had, well, not an argument, but a discussion more focused on winning than on connecting.

Growing up, my father would denigrate spiritualists and psychics and healers. I’ve tried to shed that, but our conversation showed me a place where I still have that disdain, and how it will prevent me from connecting and collaborating with some really awesome people. So this week, I explored spirituality and how it relates to science and rationality.

This isn’t a definitive answer. This is me thinking through my own prejudices and ideas. I’m hesitant to expose this work-in-progress to the internet, but I also want to share my work. I hope you enjoy it.

Debunked by a 9-Year-Old

Here’s where I started:

Scientific belief is about accuracy. Evolution is true, creationism is false, that sort of thing.

I went to a Therapeutic Touch class a few years ago. This is the NIH-approved energy healing, used in hospitals, taught by nurses for medical professionals. If anyone should be scientific about energy healing, it’s these guys.

Explaining energy, the teacher said, “If you bring your finger so it’s almost touching your other hand, you’ll feel tingles. That’s energy.” And indeed, we did feel it.

But it took me less than a minute to debunk her claim: I closed my eyes and had a friend choose when to almost-touch my hand. I didn’t feel anything. Which means the sensation is proprioception, not energy.

You know who else debunked their claim? A 9-year-old girl. When your claims are debunked by fourth graders, you can’t gain credibility for the work that really is worth studying.

(Could a skilled mage create sensations with energy? You betcha. But that’s not what the teacher claimed.)

Accuracy and Meaning

Here’s my quick definition of science vs spirituality:

  • Science starts with, “Is this accurate?” Then it tries to find meaning within the accurate. This is where I live. For me, meaning is in helping my fellow man (through energy healing and exploring magick, mostly).
  • Spirituality starts with, “How can I find meaning here?” Then it discards overly-inaccurate beliefs that would interfere with daily living. Spirituality also seems to accept special cases, like “this storm means something, but storms in general do not.”

The Secret and Cancer

You remember The Secret, right? Choose what you want, act like it’s already true, and it will happen. Great advice for people trying to start a business or find a job: Dress and act the part, and you’ll probably find success.

But some reader said, “I have cancer. But if I didn’t have cancer, I wouldn’t go to the doctor, I wouldn’t get treatment. So I’m going to act like I don’t have cancer, and by the Law of Attraction, my cancer will disappear.” Details here.

In other words, that reader took what should have been a domain-limited temporary belief, and applied it like a scientifically-accurate belief.

We all do this. It’s pleasant to believe I listen well, so until recently I didn’t put in the work to become a better listener. And I decided that fashion doesn’t matter, because that was easier than learning about it.

We all let pleasant beliefs trump reality sometimes. The only defense I have is to reflexively reject a belief as soon as I notice it’s untrue. I’ve trained myself to do that, not always, but often. I think that’s a virtue.

But if someone doesn’t reflexively discard false beliefs, I don’t want to consider that a vice.

God Doesn’t Cause Breakups

On the subway, the woman next to me is reading a facebook post: “When a relationship ends, maybe it was God deciding it was time for it to end, that this was best for your growth.”

No one thinks God causes breakups. But that’s not the point. The point was, this woman was in pain, and finding this meaning in her suffering helped her get through her day, get to work, make money to feed her kids. (I read Viktor Frankl in college, it’s stayed with me.)

Finding meaning only in accurate beliefs is good. But who am I to deny that woman her comfort?

I’m lucky enough to have the right sort of intelligence and background that lets me find meaning in a scientifically-accurate world, but someone born without that type of intelligence would have to choose. How can I fault them for choosing meaning?

I think intelligence is a blessing, but I don’t think that people born with less intelligence are somehow morally inferior. And seeing this, I felt my science-as-a-virtue moral superiority start to fade.

Steelman

You know a strawman, right? That’s where you present a weak form of your opponent’s argument so you can demolish it.

Steelman is the opposite. It’s a technique among rationalists, where we make the strongest possible argument, even if our opponents aren’t actually making it.

Here’s my spirituality steelman:

Meaning creates happiness, confidence, and health. It lowers stress and improves the drive to create. It is a goodness.

Accuracy is also a goodness. Accuracy gives us vaccines, airplanes, science and technology.

Meaning provides short-term value, accuracy provides long-term value. We need both.

A placebo works even if you know it’s a placebo. So shouldn’t we allow ourselves to find false-but-non-harmful meaning, while still knowing deep down that it’s false? Can’t we adopt a belief but flag it as “not-true,” and still get the meaning-centric benefits?

Reflexes and False Beliefs

That argument resonated with me. If you do a steelman right, it usually will.

I still don’t trust false beliefs. We can’t know the true cost of a false belief. And it’s so easy to believe pleasant fictions. I don’t want to train my brain toward accepting fictions.

(That reflex, to turn toward painful-but-accurate beliefs, is what drove me to explore spirituality, after all. It would have been easier to just look down on my friends than to examine a value I learned as a child.)

And yet, I can see how an intelligent person could choose differently, not through logical errors or flawed thinking, but through having different goals. And I can respect that.

Gandhi’s Not Lazy

The next morning, I woke with a sentence in my mind:

Spirituality is the lazy man’s philosophy.

But that’s not fair. Sure, spirituality can be a lazy man’s philosophy, but that’s true of anything. You’re supposed to use rationality to update beliefs and change behaviors, but plenty of people use it to justify the stupid things they were already doing. And you can use scientific terms without understanding the actual science. (New rule: Anyone proposing Quantum anything must be able to calculate Schrodinger’s equation.)

There’s a lazy form to everything. That’s not unique to spirituality.

But Gandhi’s not lazy. He did spirituality right, used it to motivate hard action and real change.

And I find myself wondering, is there a set of spiritual practices, focused on finding meaning, that also support a scientifically-accurate worldview?

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

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Healing Sessions for a Cancer Patient: Better Sleep & 3 More (My Work Dec 13-26)

Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

My friend is dying of cancer. I visited recently. Good to reconnect, share love, bring her some joy.

I also did healing sessions where I could. In this post, I talk about each technique: Better sleep, pain reduction, anti-infection, and anti-inflammation.

Energy for Sleep via Physical Touch

She was constantly tired, but unable to sleep well. Maybe 5 hours a night, with long periods of wakefulness.

My goal: Find an energy signature to help her sleep, then find a way for her to trigger it herself, as needed. The challenge here is that, while on meds, she can’t use ethereal software very well, so I need a way for her to trigger it without needing to command the ethereal software.

Before I discuss the technique, here’s the result: She slept for 8 hours the first night. She got up once to use the bathroom, but got right back to sleep. (I’ve forgotten to ask about her other nights since then.)

Figuring out the energy signature was easy enough. I’d already developed one when Lisa worked night shifts, to help her sleep in the morning.

Fun note: These days, I do energy effects by engaging my full aura then thinking about the energy. This worked great: I did that, massaged her head, and she went from mildly tired to fully asleep in just a few breaths, less than 30 seconds. Then I sat down to program the signature into the ethereal software, and I was sooooo tired. Because, you guessed it, I hadn’t returned my aura to its normal signature, and now I was hitting myself with the sleepy energy too. Barely turned it off before passing out.

Programming was easy. I told the ethereal software, “When I ask for ‘sleepy energy,’ put this signature in the person’s head. Mild energetic pressure, run it until they tell you to stop.” Done.

To tie the effect to an object, I held a stone, connected to it, then told the ethereal software, “When she holds this stone, trigger the sleepy effect on her.” I set another stone with an “awake energy” command, and a third with a “stop” command.

Years ago, I’d tied a protection effect to a necklace. It was exhausting. I could barely communicate with the ethereal software, had to focus just to connect to the object. This time, it was easy, something fun to do over breakfast. Empowering to see that change.

Energy Healing for Pain

On Friday, she experienced acute pain (9/10) near the original site of the cancer. I did a healing session, and within 30 minutes, the pain was down to a 6/10. By the evening, it was down to 3/10.

The healing technique: I connected to her, traced through her nerves to find the painful area, and applied an energy designed to numb the nerves, intended to block the pain signal. For details, see the 2nd attempt in healing for chronic hives.

How much would the pain have declined without this healing technique? No way to know. She also got acupuncture that day. But all the same, I’m rather proud of the result.

We stopped there, rather than programming the effect into the ethereal software. The healing technique requires spotting the right nerves and adjusting the signature to their current state, and I wasn’t sure how to program that. But she can call me when she’s in pain, and I’ll connect and do this again.

Energy for Infection & Inflammation

As is common with chemo patients, she had infections and inflammation throughout her body. I did whole-body effects, using commands already programmed into the ethereal software to build energy throughout her body.

The first was, “Fight / counter this infection, and continuously adjust the signature to ensure you’re countering the current signature of the infection.” Later, I’d add, “Once a day, check for new types of infections, and counter those too.” I wrote about this before, and I still can’t say whether it does what I’m asking it to do, but that was the intent, and the results look promising.

The second was, “Standard anti-inflammation effect for all the cells with her underlying signature.” Again, I can’t say the actual impact on cellular inflammation, but that was the intent, and I’ve gotten good results in the past.

I know, I always talk about consciously guiding the energy rather than sending out your intent. But this time, I simply asked the ethereal software for what I wanted, and let it handle the details, because I know it’s programmed with those commands. Still, there’s value in understanding those details, because we did hit a snag:

Initially, I’d asked for, “Standard anti-inflammation on her whole body.” The ethereal software rejected that command. It said that anti-infection, which harms cells, would compete with anti-inflammation. I could have either, but not both.

To share the solution, I have to explain about signatures a bit. If you think of a signature as a molecule, it’s made of smaller building blocks (atoms), which are made of even smaller building blocks (protons and such). Call the molecules the large-scale signature, and the protons the small-scale or underlying signature.

All of a person’s cells, plus the pro-biotics that are with us for years, have the same underlying signature. Infections have their own, different small-scale signature. When I tell the ethereal software to counter the infections, it looks for anything with a foreign underlying signature and harms it.

When we asked for anti-inflammation on her whole body, that included those infection cells, which the software rejected. But when we ask for anti-inflammation on the cells with her underlying signature, that only hits her cells, not the infection cells, so there’s no conflict. Success.

That’s why I put so much emphasis on understanding how my tools work: Even when I’m trusting the ethereal software to handle the details, sometimes it needs a little help.

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Healing Aura, Healing Touch (My Work Nov 22 – Dec 12)

Sunday, December 14th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Have you ever shaken hands with a healer and just known they had good energy? This week, I began learning to turn on that good-healing-energy feeling at will.

Also, since my last update three weeks ago, I finished creating the new ethereal muscle. It works, but not well enough. Details below.

Feeling Like a Healer

I want my touch to feel healing and positive. Not all the time, but anytime I choose. Three reasons:

  • I’m seeing my dying friend later this week. I’d like to relieve whatever suffering I can.
  • I’m attending Pantheacon next year, and want to practice energy healing and refine my techniques. If my handshake feels positive, I’ll probably have more takers.
  • Efficiently delivering an energy signature via my aura seems like a component of other useful techniques, and this is an excuse to learn it.

Developing the Technique

Based on testing a few years ago, I know that building energy in the right signature gives your touch that reassuring feeling of a healer. You build the energy, release it, the other person feels it, they’re reassured.

(Note: I only tested with myself and a friend sensitive to energy. It probably doesn’t work with people who don’t feel energy.)

I don’t have words for different types of energy, so I don’t recall exactly what signature I used back then. But I thought about how I wanted to feel: A balanced, full, wholeness to my energy, and I let my unconscious handle the details. Easy enough.

But building the energy is only half the technique. The other half is delivering it, and that involves something I noticed a few weeks ago with erotic energy:

When I think about my aura, and place energy in it, I get a small result. But when I feel my aura before engaging the energy, I get a bigger result, in both myself and my partner.

What does it mean to “feel my aura”? Technically, it means engaging the sensory connections I’ve placed throughout my aura. Practically, it means feeling my aura’s current signature throughout my body.

Remember the post about imagining moving my arm vs actually reaching out? That’s what’s going on here. Thinking about my aura is like imagining my arm moving. It tells my ethereal muscles that I’d like to engage my aura, but doesn’t give them any specifics. But engaging my aura is like engaging my arm muscles, and by consciously guiding my ethereal muscles through the process of engaging my entire aura, I get a bigger result when I want to change its energy.

So, the full technique: Engage my entire aura, from my energy reservoir on out. Think about a full, healing energy, and shift my aura to that energy. As I release that energy, my ethereal muscles will unconsciously build more, using the [L]techniques from earlier this year.

A Useful Side-Effect

I’ve been consulting in Kansas this week, so I haven’t had a chance to test how the energy feels. But I did find an unexpected side-effect: Shifting to a healing aura also energizes me.

On Tuesday, I got exhausted around 4pm. A combination of complex work and jetlag-induced insomnia had me unable to focus, with a working memory so small I couldn’t hold a paragraph-long answer in my head. I could still help the client, but not with anything complicated.

I’d been practicing my healing aura since Sunday. And practicing while tired seemed like a good way to build stamina. So, during a brief downtime, I set my aura to a healing signature, not expecting any useful results, just to strengthen my ethereal muscles.

In less than a minute, I felt better. Less tired. Able to juggle ideas again. I kept my healing aura engaged for around 10 minutes, and the better focus lasted in full force for that whole time. Even after I stopped engaging my aura, I still felt much better, able to do work I couldn’t have done before engaging my aura. A surprising, pleasant, useful result.

(Why does the surprise matter? Placebos don’t surprise us. They create exactly what we expect. When we get something unexpected, that indicates that we’re working with something real, and not just our expectations.)

I used it Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, too, with similar results.

A New Ethereal Muscle

My last weekly update, three weeks ago, discussed creating new ethereal muscles.

Background: Ethereal muscles are the parts of the mind that do magick. They’re not parts of the brain, but rather ethereal structures that connect to the brain. It’s analogous to a cyborg with computer chips connected to their brain, enhancing their thinking capabilities and letting them interact with computers and robots in distant locations.

In the past, I’ve only awakened ethereal muscles I already had, or that spirits had made for me. In the past few weeks, I created a new muscle.

The Technique

The broad strokes are simple enough: Break the task down into steps. Find ethereal muscles that can do each step. Copy them. Hook them up, tell them what to do in this new process, then hook the whole thing up to the rest of your ethereal muscles.

I wanted the new ethereal muscle to keep track of the signatures of my whole body, or the whole body of someone I was working with. Then, instead of keeping track of all those signatures with my brain, I’d have a dedicated ethereal muscle to do it, so I could do work even while tired, and so I could devote my focus to other tasks like more complex healing techniques.

So, break it down into steps: One component to recognize and store signatures (Part 1), and another to store locations (Part 2). Then, when I sense a signature, the new muscle will store the signature and location information, and build up a map of signatures.

In more detail: When doing sensory connections while engaging this new muscle, all signatures go into the new muscle. It stores them (part 1), with location / adjacency information (part 2) to record which signatures are next to which signatures. That’s a map I can recall without having to re-sample the sensory info. Then I need something to let my brain (or other ethereal muscles) request / traverse that info (which probably involves querying part 2).

Copying the ethereal muscles was easy enough. Programming them was surprisingly easy, too — they seem to understand my thoughts, and didn’t require any special programming language. This only took a few hours, spread over several days.

Results

But figuring out the program is hard. And this one doesn’t work right.

The new muscle is somewhat useful. I can look around an aura, then disconnect, then use the new muscle to recall signatures. I can’t be sure that I’m not just remembering the signatures normally with my brain, but I can recall more details with less focus, so we’ll go with that for now.

But I’d wanted to get a big picture of the aura as I was working with it, and that definitely isn’t happening. I mean, I can still build that picture with my brain’s working memory, but that only happens if I focus. If I relax my brain and engage the new ethereal muscle, I don’t get a big picture.

So, a good experience on the whole. I learned how to create new ethereal muscles, and I learned that the programming is the hard part. I also learned that my experience programming computers will probably help with this, long-term.

But for now, I’m going to put this on the back burner and focus on techniques with my aura, on creating sensations with energy, and on better communication techniques for better manifesting.

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Creating New Ethereal Muscles (My Work Nov 15-21)

Monday, November 24th, 2014

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Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

In Direct Magick, we call the parts of the mind that drive magick ethereal muscles.

Each ethereal muscle does a different job: Communication, guiding energy in the body, sensing others’ energy, recognizing signatures — just about everything I do with magick, actually.

But not quite everything. Some tasks, I don’t have an ethereal muscle for. Instead, I cobble that task together from other ethereal muscles, guided by my conscious mind. But that’s slow, tiring, and doesn’t work if I’m unfocused.

This week, I learned about creating new ethereal muscles to speed up these tasks. And, perhaps, to increase intelligence and other benefits.

Tasks vs Techniques

A bit of terminlogy:

Full techniques, like energy healing, are too big for one ethereal muscle. Techniques are generally guided consciously.

But in this post, we’re talking about small tasks, like connecting to that injured tissue, or recognizing its signature. Tasks are the building blocks of techniques.

Here’s an analogy: Imagine you’re painting, with a brush on canvas. That’s a technique. The tasks might be holding the brush, moving your arm, and looking at the model. And if you want to focus on the overall technique of painting, it’s important that you don’t have to consciously think about flexing your fingers to hold the brush or moving your eyes to see the model, right?

That’s what we’re doing here: Letting ethereal muscles handle tasks (without conscious focus), so we can focus on the larger techniques (like energy healing).

Feeling My Whole Aura

For the past months, I’ve been working on aura. Why are we talking about ethereal muscles now?

Here’s the thread I’m following: Last week, I embedded sensory connections throughout my aura. This week, I practiced looking around aura, noticing my energy signatures throughout the day and getting used to taking it all in.

Then I hit a snag: I could sense the signature in any particular part of my body anytime, even if I was tired. But to assemble an overall picture of my whole body’s energy, I had to be awake and focused.

Minor problem, but annoying enough that I thought about it. And I realized, I was assembling that picture using my brain, rather than my ethereal muscles. (I also confirmed this with the spirits I work with.)

The solution? Create a new ethereal muscle that assembles that picture.

Why Bother?

Part of me thinks this is a distraction.

I’ve been assembling the picture in my brain. That’s been working fine. Sure, it’s nice to be able to do magick while tired, but it’s not really necessary. Maybe it’s better to keep going with aura and creating a technique to cause sensations in most people.

I pondered this Wednesday, during work breaks. There are two reasons to create the new ethereal muscle:

Short-term, off-loading this task will free up my limited brain focus for other things. That will make it easier to learn to work with my aura, and to learn more complex techniques too. And to do those techniques while unfocused.

And long-term, I want to offload more tasks to my ethereal muscles. Some magick functions seem simple and useful, like energy healing for inflamed muscles.

But what if we could also use ethereal muscles for non-magick functions? What if an ethereal muscle could interact with my visual centers to improve visual recall? Or interact with my logical centers to keep track of details as I think through business decisions? Or step in when my brain is tired to help me think clearly and be patient with an upset friend? What if we could augment the brain with magickal resources, like how sci-fi cyborgs augment their brains with computer equipment?

And you know the sci-fi trope of uploading a person into a computer AI, so their mind lives after their body dies? Well, what if we can upload an entire mind into ethereal muscles?

I don’t know if any of these ideas will pan out. Maybe none will. Maybe it’ll lead to something else. But this is how I think about magick, and why I think it’s so worth exploring.

Next week we’ll discuss the actual technique.

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Brain Aura (My Work November 8-14)

Friday, November 14th, 2014

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Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

Last week, I set up my aura so I could feel it more easily. This week, I did the same for my brain’s aura, then used it to improve my communication with spirits and ethereal software.

Setting Up My Brain’s Aura

Last week, I embedded sensory connections into my aura. It lets me feel what my aura is connected to, how open or closed my aura gate is, and what energy signature the various parts of my aura are in.

And I got an idea: What if I embed sensory connections in other structures? Would I gain the same awareness?

I tried embedding connections in my ethereal muscles, but they refused. They’re too intricate and might be damaged.

But they said yes to brain aura. Just like last week, I simply asked my ethereal muscles to embed the sensory connections, and they handled the rest. I just focused on my consulting job and let my ethereal muscles do their thing. It took two days.

Looking around, my brain’s aura is vast. Several times larger than my body’s. I doubt I’m unique in that.

And, broadly, I wonder if creating these sensory connections is part of learning any skill. That is, if I’d simply practiced for years, would I have similar sensory connections embedded in my aura? Is this a unique setup, or just a short cut? Something to look into later.

Note: Remember thinking mind? Important ethereal structure, horrible name. I’ve renamed it “brain aura.” This section is all about embedding sensory connections in thinking mind.

Finer Communication

Here’s what I’d planned to do with those sensory connections in brain aura: Throughout the day, as I do and feel different things, I’d notice the signatures, build up a library of signatures I recognize. Later, I could use that to identify and influence mental states in myself and others. (Remember, healing = influence for good.)

I’ll get to that eventually. But I got sidetracked with communication.

Communication works by reading and writing my brain’s aura. And communication muscles very much wanted to use my sensory connections to do that reading.

So I engaged the muscles that handle sensory connections, had them work with communication, let that run for a day. That first attempt turned out bad — the signatures were precise, and everything else felt too large, mushy, even damaging to the sensory connections. So I updated some settings and ran it for another two days.

It finished on Thursday. Communication is working again, feels much better, finer, more precise. I’ll see how it affects my results. It feels promising.

Closing Thoughts

A week ago, I found that aura isn’t practical for a lot of techniques. I wasn’t sure if the time I’d spent on it was worthwhile. A few wrong turns are the unavoidable cost of doing anything new, I told myself.

But exploring aura lead to these sensory connections in my brain. Which lead to better communication. Which is rather useful.

This is why I describe my work as exploring magick, rather than learning it. Because it’s not a linear path. If I’d set out to improve communication, I never would have said, “Let’s learn to feel my body’s aura better.” But it turns out, that’s where I needed to go.

Magick isn’t a straight path.

Also, this setup lets my ethereal muscles interact with my body more precisely. With these sensory connections, I’m able to feel more than I could before. If I’d just intended to feel my body, but not guided my ethereal muscles to create these sensory connections, it wouldn’t work nearly as well.

This setup is one of the tools I use for magick, above and beyond intent, and I want to highlight that for anyone who sees magick as just about intent. You can do even more if you add some more tools.

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Sensing My Aura (My Work November 1-7)

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

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

Every Friday, I discuss what I learned that week. Lost? Read the archives.

This week, I learned to extend my aura, embedded sensory connections in my aura so I can feel what it touches, and found that aura is impractical for long-distance energy healing.

Extending Aura

Last week I asked, “What’s special about aura that makes it better at sending energy than ordinary connections?”

The answer, it seems, is that one aura-type connection is made of lots of ordinary connections. The best visual is a dozen connections, laid next to one another, bound together into a flat sheet, then wrapped up into a spiral, like a barbershop pole. It’s orderly, and dense — the spiral means the ordinary connections are at an angle, and one inch of the aura-type connection involves several inches of each ordinary connection. Which means there’s a ton of ethereal structure there, which can hold a lot of energy.

(Of course, I don’t know if it actually looks like that. It probably doesn’t. But hopefully that gets you thinking in the same direction I am.)

I should mention, I don’t know if that visualization is useful on its own. It’s a way to express what I felt when I used sensory connections to feel my own aura, the density and weight of that structure. The visualization refers to that feeling, it communicates my intent to my ethereal muscles, but if they hadn’t directly felt my aura, I don’t know that they’d know what to do with the visualization.

I spent a couple bus rides extending aura-like connections over distance. It took focus at first, but it’s pretty easy now. It still isn’t fast, though.

Also, I noticed I couldn’t feel what those aura-like connection was touching, so I added a sensory connection to it. That lets me guide these dense connections to the right structures to work with. (I visualize the sensory connection going through the middle of the spiral, though again, I doubt that’s what actually happens.)

Sensing Aura

After learning to make sensory connections inside new aura-like connections, I also extended sensory connections throughout my existing aura. This has made me more aware of my own energy, of its signature as I go through the day, and also of what I’m connected to. The idea is to target specific ethereal structures with my aura, like a partner’s inner aura and the paths to their mind.

I also extended sensory connections throughout my aura gate, making me aware of how open it is, and letting me close or open it more thoroughly. Useful for shielding (close it) and for sending and receiving energy (open it).

I haven’t done formal testing yet, but a promising preliminary result: I’d closed the gate, then forgotten about it until I was making love with an energy-sensitive partner. Without telling her, and without changing anything else, I opened the gate. She responded quite strongly. So, it seems like controlling aura gate is an effective way to control the flow of energy. Also, this confirms I’m actually moving ethereal structures, rather than just imagining it all.

Aura for Healing

A friend asked me to “send loving energy.” Yes, I know she just wants me to wish her well. But being the literalist I am, I wondered about actually doing it.

If I were in person, I’d think about loving her, build that energy in my body, and open my aura gate. At distance, what if I create aura-like connections to her, then put the energy on that connection? That should work better than just making ordinary connections, which tend to transmit only a small amount of energy.

Building the aura-like connection took about 10 minutes. Slow, but not difficult. Then I sent energy. But remember how we said that these dense connections can hold a lot of energy? That means they need to be charged first. That took a minute, and was fairly tiring. Then I kept the energy flowing, but felt much less energy reach her than I expected. After 5 minutes of sending, I was exhausted and had a headache, and had to stop. I asked her later, and she hadn’t felt much of anything.

I’d asked about this sort of technique earlier this year. My trainers said it was impractical, too inefficient to be worth doing. And you know what? They’re right. (They’ve also shown me techniques that should work over distances, which I’ll try next time.)

It’s said that Edison invented the light bulb by trying 1,000 versions that didn’t work. I’m choosing to interpret this finding as part of that process.

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