Posts Tagged ‘Quick Tips’

The Key to Learning Energy

Saturday, September 30th, 2017

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“I tried using your ethereal software for manifesting, but how do I know if I’m doing it right?” Jill asked me.

(Ethereal software is my system’s term for the forces we channel. Other terms for those forces include egregores, matrices, and The Universe.)

Jill studies a system of energy healing that uses rituals to engage their forces. I’m teaching her to use ethereal software by sending messages directly, without the ritual. It’s faster and more flexible, but it takes some adjusting.

I had several answers for her:

First, it occurs to me that manifesting might not be the best skill to start with. Any single case is ambiguous — would that luck have happened anyway? And there’s a delay, often days or weeks, between requesting an event and having it materialize. The key to learning is immediate, clear feedback, and manifesting offers neither.

Second, we want to find some skill so useful that you want to use it every day, so you practice without needing to force yourself to practice. I’m realizing that, rather than asking someone what they want to learn, I should offer them a list of easy, useful energy techniques, and ask them which one they would use daily. For Jill, there’s an energy I’ve used to help her relax and focus that she likes, so I programmed that energy into the ethereal software and taught her to use that.

Healing techniques like this also give immediate feedback — she either feels more calm and focused, or she doesn’t.

At this point, Jill asked, “But how can I know that feeling is the result of energy, not placebo?”

That brings me to my third answer: It’s OK to trust how energy feels. Sure, there’s no way to be certain it’s not just your imagination, but that’s why once a month you come to Energy Geek and play energy games with other people, verify that they can locate your energy blindfolded, recognize the energy of different people without seeing or hearing them, and all the other games we play. That’s important, but it’s hard to do solo. So let your daily practice be based on feeling energy, and let those games be a special thing you do once a month.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just find some energy work you want to do daily, and do it. Feel the results. Do it for three months, get those 100 repetitions in, and then think about how to improve it. But get started. That’s the key.

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Divination & Manifesting (Notes for Upcoming Class)

Sunday, May 1st, 2016

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Tarot. Astrology. Magick for wealth, love, and success. Divination (predicting the future) and manifesting (creating luck) are cornerstones of most magickal practice.

This post is my notes for a new class I’m creating. It covers:

  • How to choose good divination questions and manifesting intents
  • Techniques for sending out those questions / intents
  • Techniques for hearing the answers
  • How to use this magick in healthy and safe ways.

I’m teaching this class Thursday May 12, 7-9PM at Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. It’s free — both to support my friends who run the cafe, and to test out the class in a more informal setting. If you’re in the bay area, I hope you’ll attend. RSVP here (facebook).

Choosing Good Questions & Intents

Here’s an example good request: Cause me to find a job that I’ll be happy with, and that will leave me the time and energy to study magick.

Let’s talk about some ways that it’s good, and some traps to avoid:

Make it general. I’m not asking for a specific job, I’m asking for any job with these properties. A few reasons for this. First, whatever is guiding this success knows more about the paths of fate than I do, so I don’t want to overconstrain the request and possibly wind up in a job I thought I’d like but that is actually bad. Second, manifesting seems to create lucky breaks. If I ask for a specific job and there’s path where I get it, the manifesting simply fails. We don’t want that.

Specify what “good” means. I find that if I ask for a “good job,” that’s too vague. Does good mean stable? Interesting? Has the chance of finding a good romantic relationship? The forces we’re channeling don’t seem to think quite like humans do, so it’s best to specify clear success criteria.

Make it positive. Think about making your request over a bad cell connection, dropping every other word. “Find job happy” is probably ok. But if you ask, “Find me a job that won’t exhaust me, and that won’t interfere with my relationship,” and some of the words don’t transmit properly, you could wind up with something terrible.

Time frame. Some people like to specify that it should happen within a certain time frame. I prefer to avoid specifying the time frame (what if I specify 3 months, and the perfect job would take 4). I trust the force I’m channeling to understand that sooner is better than later. But different people channel different forces, so this may have to do with the specific force I use — try both ways, see what works for you.

Sending Out Those Requests

Main goal is to engage the parts of your mind that drive energy and magick (your “ethereal muscles”), contact a force to channel (some “ethereal software”), and get your intent to that force. Many ways to do this.

By default, most people’s ethereal muscles are unconscious. So most systems of magick focus on getting the intent into the unconscious. Visualizations, rituals, sigils, etc all do this. Note: Even without a force to channel, getting your unconscious aligned with your intent will probably help you notice opportunities and execute on your goals.

The other half is having a force to channel. Usually not explicitly discussed. People are often connected to these forces during initiations. Forces can also be bound to rituals and sigils, so doing the ritual / focusing on the sigil will get the force to connect to the person. This only works for already-established rituals and sigils, not one you just made up.

Simplest method: Focus on the sigil in this post. (It also discusses testing we’ve done on this blog.) Focus on your intent, repeat it several times. The force is programmed to read and act on your intent. For more details, see this book-in-progress.

Hearing the Answers

This is the main difference between manifesting and divination (or psychic intuitions). Manifesting is usually send-and-forget, while divination is about getting info back.

But getting info back with manifesting is useful too. Find out whether the request was accepted, if there are reasonable paths to success, etc.

Responses can be hard to hear, like talking over bad cell connection. Yes / No is easier to understand than a sentence. This is useful: Turn an open-ended question into a series of multiple choice questions, then feel into each choice and try to notice the “Yes.” Systems that use this include tarot (where each card has multiple conflicting meanings, and the reader selects the “correct” one for this reading) and some systems of astrology (the reader selects which planets and meanings “matter most.”)

Some forces can create lasting connections to a person’s mind, improving the communication over months. The sources for psychic intuitions usually do this. There are also techniques in Direct Magick to create a clearer communication channel as needed.

Try using manifesting to guide decisions. “Cause me to create a good plan for…” (then spell out your goal and what “good” means.) Then sit down and plan your next steps, paying attention to feelings that the option you’re considering is good or bad. This makes it easy for the force to influence your decisions, ensures you’re paying attention to these intuitions when they come (much easier than listening all day, through conversations and other projects), and is super ethical.

Staying Healthy and Safe

Avoid goals that require specific people to take specific actions, both for ethics and for higher success rates. “Cause me to find a healthy, supportive relationship,” not “Cause me to date this specific person.”

Consider: Would you do this if everyone involved knew about it? If not, that’s a strong sign it’s unethical.

Some people are concerned about influencing others in any way. Remember, we influence others every day, both consciously and unconsciously, in how we dress, speak, and everything else we do. To have any impact on the world, we need to influence others. If you would work toward your goal through ordinary means, it’s probably ethical to manifest for it too.

A technique I use all the time: “Cause me to make good decisions for…” (then spell out your goal.) Restrict your manifesting to only influencing yourself.

Don’t blindly trust divination. A lot has to go right for it to work: Phrasing the question properly, sending and receiving the message, and the force has to see the future properly. None of this is 100%. If you think the path laid out is a bad idea, or feel a sense of dread about it, listen to yourself. (At the very least, try at least 3 other ways of asking the question.)

Come to the Class

I’m teaching this class Thursday May 12, 7-9PM at Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. It’s free — both to support my friends who run the cafe, and to test out the class in a more informal setting. If you’re in the bay area, I hope you’ll attend. RSVP here (facebook).

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

Wishes…

Monday, April 28th, 2014

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“I wish magick was easy.”

No, you don’t. Because if it were easy, someone else would have already done it.

You wish it was easy for you, but still hard for everyone else.

Sorry, that only exists in movies.

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2 Unintuitive Signs You’re on the Right Track

Monday, April 7th, 2014

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1. You discover you were wrong.

2. You feel like a beginner.

That’s how you know you’re exploring something you haven’t seen before.

(This is happening to me with aura and energy in the body.)

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Interviewing a Healer? Ask About Failures

Friday, December 13th, 2013

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“How do I pick a good healer?”

It’s a common question. I mean, it’s hard enough to find a good doctor, and they have licensing and review boards. How can a layman possibly tell a good healer from a fraud?

Asking about their techniques is useless, I’ve been doing this for 20+ years and can’t separate a novice from someone skilled but lacking insight into how their unconscious mind does magick. Asking about successes is nice, but it’s hard to tell placebo from real healing. And references have the same problem: How many failures did they have as they collected those 10 positive reviews?

So, do whatever you’d normally do, and then ask about failures. “Tell me about a healing session that failed, and how you handled it.” A few things to look for:

  • Do they own up to failure? Even skilled surgeons fail, and healing is nowhere near as mature a discipline as surgery. The only way to not fail is to not track your results, which means you can’t learn.
  • Do they debug their techniques? When I fail, I go back and try other approaches. Heal different tissues, heal a larger area, get spirits involved, program a new signature into my healing software. Don’t try to evaluate their techniques, but make sure they can intelligently discuss their debugging process.
  • Do they seem comfortable? Someone who truly believes in themselves can accept failures, and talk about what they’ve learned, or how they tried again and succeeded later, or how they’re proud of how scientifically they track their results. Someone filled with doubt — of their skill or of magick in general — will experience failures as painful reminders of those doubts, and avoid the subject. (See item 1.)

Do you have a good question for selecting good healers?

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Over-Thinking Visualizations

Monday, December 9th, 2013

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Last night, a friend asked, “For energy meditations, what exactly should I visualize?”

My answer: It doesn’t matter how you represent energy, just pick something that speaks to you. Fire, water, light, glowing mist, they all work roughly the same.

Here’s why: Your visualization communicates your intent to your unconscious. Your unconscious mind then does whatever it does to create the actual energy. And, in general, actually creating the energy has very little to do with what you visualized.

So, just pick something. See how your unconscious responds. Then pick something else, and see what’s the same, and what’s different, in how your unconscious responds. Learn what speaks to your unconscious, and how to produce the results you’re looking for.

Her summary: “Stop over-thinking the visualization.”

Two more notes:

  • Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that, just because your unconscious responds a certain way to a particular visualization, that anyone else’s unconscious will respond the same way.
  • What’s next? For me, it’s taking the unconscious parts parts of the mind that drive magick — the “ethereal muscles” — and making them conscious, so we can become aware of what they actually do to perform magick, (which often has very little to do with what we visualize), and adjust how they do it.
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Easy Magick to Improve Your Life

Friday, November 1st, 2013

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A reader asks:

What little things can I apply basic magick to in my life?

A few ideas:

Luck: Pick something you could reasonably do, and use manifesting to make it successful. Job search, dates, intense talks with people you care about. Anything you could reasonably do, but want to make sure works out, ask, “Make X successful.”

Calming: Notice the energy signature of your head and body when you’re calm. Learn to build energy in that signature, and fill yourself with it. Then, when you want to calm down, build that calm energy. (Should work for any emotion.)

Energy Healing: Find some ethereal software for energy healing, ask it to send healing energy to the person. For working with cuts, inflammation, and similar problems, most healing software seems to do well. I think the software I’m including with my book is already set up for energy healing.

So, three broad categories: Luck, emotions, energy healing. Now it’s up to you to spot these cases in your own life.

And one more thought: This is the right approach. Not, “How can I use magick to solve X problem,” or, “How can I use magick to do amazing feats,” but, “What does this tool do well, and what of that is easy?”

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Using Pendulums

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

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A reader emails:

Do you think pendulums can be another way of activating etheric muscles for a beginner?

I can see why he asked: I talk about awakening ethereal muscles, other folks talk about using pendulums, and as a beginner, you don’t have a real model of how all these different pieces interact. So why not combine the two, and use a pendulum to awaken ethereal muscles?

Short answer is “no.” But if you’re like me, you want to know why.

What Pendulums Do

Imagine your unconscious mind knows something. Maybe a psychic intuition, maybe an ordinary intuition, maybe some other info that you don’t know how to get into your conscious mind. So you ask a question, then doing some action your unconscious mind can control, and watch for it. That’s where pendulums come in.

You hold the pendulum, and tiny movements of your hand move it clockwise or counterclockwise. You consciously focus on holding your hand steady, and your unconscious handles those tiny movements, producing a visible motion that hopefully represents its answer to your question.

In other words, a pendulum is a way for your unconscious to display information. (So do divining rods and similar devices that amplify small unconscious movements.)

Don’t believe me? I’ve heard people say that the energy in a chakra swirls clockwise or counterclockwise, and the pendulum is caught up by this energy. Why a pendulum would be moved by magickal energy when no other physical object is, I don’t know, but it’s easy to test: Tie your pendulum to a stand or a table or some other steady, inanimate object. See if it swings and changes direction and all that. (If you do, youtube it and post a link.)

Pendulums Won’t Alter Ethereal Muscles

Pendulums are physical objects. Ethereal anything (muscles, software, energy, etc) generally aren’t affected by the movements of physical objects. Sure, there are some special cases: Your ethereal muscles listen to your brain and respond to your thoughts, and you can tie ethereal software to an object or sigil. But in general, if you want to affect an ethereal X, you need some other ethereal Y that knows how to affect it.

That’s why the software for my book is programmed to awaken your ethereal muscles.

Using Pendulums

Pendulums might be useful for displaying information. If you’re having trouble consciously receiving messages from spirits or ethereal software, assign one meaning to clockwise, one to counterclockwise, and ask your question. This doesn’t help you differentiate between psychic vs normal intuitions, but it might be useful for beginners doing their first explorations.

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Pre-Hindsight

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

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A story from a recent workshop:

An engineer sent a chip for testing. The report would say whether the chip broke under stress, or whether it worked properly. As the guy is coming to deliver the report, the engineer can see from the man’s face that the chip failed. Instantly, the engineer knows how the chip failed: A crack in this location from this much heat. He didn’t read the report — simply knowing the chip had failed was enough to make his mind come up with the most likely explanation. And as an expert, his most likely explanation is usually right.

That’s hindsight: Once X fails, your mind is great at telling a reasonable story for why X failed.

Which brings us to pre-hindsight: Before you attempt X, imagine a future where you know X failed. You’re getting that report. And let the hindsight part of your mind engage and tell you the most likely reason X failed. Then, in light of this insight, consider if you want to adjust your approach and instead do X+1.

I’ve been using this in my own magick work, when considering how to research certain techniques, and it’s been quite useful.

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Manifesting: Handling Impossible Goals

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

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A question for when you do manifesting:

If you ask for X, and X is impossible, what should the ethereal software do? Get as close to X as it can? Or do nothing?

There’s no one right answer. I change my answer depending on what X I’m asking for. But I do know, it’s better to specify how you want failure handled, rather than accepting whatever default the software thinks you might want.

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