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Simon and WSA had great comments about the value of placebo when doing healing sessions or doing self-improvement work. They made a lot of sense, and convinced me that, if you’re trying to maximize your results, you should use placebo along with whatever actual magick you do.
And yet, I don’t plan to use placebo. In fact, I still plan to actively avoid it. This started as an intuition when I read their comments — I intellectually agreed with them, but it just didn’t sit right with me. So I thought about it this morning. Here’s where I wound up:
All of my magick is about building toward something better. Understanding connections, so I can understand shielding. Building techniques to see forms and trace connections, then using them to change the signature of a particular tissue in the body, which in turn builds to a larger technique like complex healing techniques. And I’m not done building yet.
That’s the key, so I’m going to say it again: I’m not done building yet. I’m nowhere near satisfied with my magick, and I don’t think I ever will be. For me, the techniques and successes of today are mostly about knowing that I’m on the right track, and showing me which techniques are good enough to be building blocks for tomorrow’s work.
Sure, today’s techniques are convenient. I’m glad whenever I do healing techniques on myself or get a useful psychic intuition. But that’s not my focus. If it were, I’d be doing a lot more testing with ways to tweak a healing technique, and more actively seeking clients to practice on, rather than focusing on awakening more mental muscles and developing better mental postures. I focus on those things because I’m focused on developing my skills long-term, not on today’s results.
I don’t see placebo fitting into this. To my mind, when you do a healing technique, there’s the actual changes caused by shifting signatures and sending energy and whatever else you did, and then there’s changes caused by placebo. And I need to separate the two, because I can’t build on the changes caused by placebo. Those can’t become part of a larger technique, at least, not in the way I build techniques. For me, placebo is useful but spurious.
And that’s true even if placebo works by the some magickal mechanism, like the person changing their own energy signature. It doesn’t matter. If I knew the exact changes caused by placebo, I could produce them directly, without needing placebo. And if I don’t know the exact changes, then I can’t use those changes to build new models or techniques.
I think that’s my resistance to using placebo, even when it would be useful: Everything I do today is looking to the future. I’m developing building blocks, which I’ll use in better models and techniques tomorrow. And harnessing placebo to make a particular healing session more effective hinders that long-term goal.
But, all these ideas are new. I just articulated them this morning. So I might be wrong. Comments are welcome.
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