Magick of Thought

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

Sensory connections are one of the core techniques of Direct Magick. They’re how we feel the signatures of structures like a person’s aura, ethereal muscles, the ethereal software we’re channeling, and pretty much everything else we talk about here. They’re used in almost* every technique we do.

This week, I improved my sensory connections, and got more insight into how they work.

This is part of my project to create sensations in non-mages. I want to be able to feel a person’s aura more fully and navigate to any chakra, even at distance. Sure, I could imagine their forehead and hope I get a connection to that location, but sensory connections let me step through the technique and know that I’ve found the right spot.

Before we go into the new material, a quick review of sensory connections:

• A connection carries energy. Most people push energy through their connections. If you instead make the connection but don’t send energy, it will pick up a bit of energy from whatever it’s connected to. This lets you feel the signature of whatever it connects to, such as a person’s aura.
• One connection only lets you sense one location, like one spot in their aura. To get a picture of their whole aura, you need a network of connections. Think of it like an upside-down funnel: There’s one connection at the top, it splits midway down, then splits again and again until you have a ton of connections throughout the person’s aura.
• It’s also important to match the signature of whatever you’re connected to, and to do that at a small scale. But that isn’t the focus of this post, so let’s leave it aside for now.

In the past, I haven’t thought much about that network. Just make a bunch of connections, trust my ethereal muscles to handle the details, and focus on what I’m looking at. It’s worked well enough.

This week, learned about networks. According to the spirits that train me, you want to make each connection evenly spaced, like in a grid. If you don’t, if instead you just make lots of connections to whatever looks interesting, then you have no sense of scale, no feel for where each structure is located, and overall you have a muddier picture.

I learned to make that grid easily enough. I made my old network, focused on the ethereal muscle that handles the network, and thought about making an evenly-spaced grid. It adjusted everything in less than a minute. After a few times, I was able to focus on the muscle and think about the grid as I made the network, so it was evenly spaced from the start. Pretty easy.

But I couldn’t see anything. I’d make the network just fine, but got no sense of where anything was or what signatures I was connecting to. Nothing useful. But I trust these spirits, so I kept trying.

Two more days of practice, still nothing. And as I thought about it, it made sense: At the bottom of the funnel, each connection would absorb a little energy. Go higher up the funnel and those two connections would meet, and the signatures would combine, then combine again and again as we go up the funnel. At the top, you’d just have one combined signature, and no idea where it came from. So it made sense why I couldn’t feel anything.

But the more I thought about the problem, the more I felt I fundamentally didn’t understand sensory networks.

I called a trainer. Often, their answers are vague, like they want me to figure it out, or just can’t quite explain it in terms that I’m familiar with. This time, it was easy: “Yes, that’s an incredibly common problem. The problem is, you’re feeling the network only at the top. You want to make the network, then make additional connections to feel the network at various points. This, by the way, is what you do normally, you make a network (of larger, unevenly spaced connections), then you scan over it. All we’re saying is to make that base network evenly spaced (and small-scale), then you scan over it in the same way.”

I tried it. I made the network, then thought about scanning over it. And it worked, I got a clearer picture of my aura, with all the different signatures and chakras, and a feel for the spaces between those chakras, too. It was a map I could navigate with, where before I’d only been feeling around and hoping to stumble into the right spot. After a couple days of practice, it’s pretty easy.

There was just one more problem: After improving this network, I was exhausted for days. At first, I thought I just needed rest, but by day three, I knew something was up. In the shower, I recalled some old work on increasing power to my ethereal muscles, tried it out, and felt better within 30 seconds, with more improvement over the next hour. The problem was, each time I improved a technique, my ethereal muscles became stronger and needed a little more power. Do that enough times, and they start drawing more power than I have available, so I need to open the pipe more to get more power coming in. Like much of what I do, the solution took years to develop, but it’s easy to do now that I know how, and the hard part was figuring out the problem.

So, two problems solved, one useful improvement to my sensory connections. And now, I’m ready to return to making sensations in non-mages.

*Almost every technique: They’re not used in sending your intent to ethereal software.