Posts Tagged ‘Sensory connections’

How I Create New Energy Techniques

Saturday, August 5th, 2017

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

I often talk about engineering energy techniques. But what does that mean? How is that different than practicing, or creating new visualizations? Today I want to share some of my recent work on becoming more aware of exactly which signatures of energy are in my body, and where.

At last month’s Energy Geek, I met a person who was more in tune with the energy in their body than I was. And I got competitive. I gave myself 4 weeks to catch up.

Here’s what happened: We were playing a new game with two senders and one receiver. One sender (randomly selected) would send, and the receiver would identify the energy and say who was sending. I demoed the game with two volunteers, M and T. First I got a feel for each of their energies: M’s felt like pressure on my back and T’s like a gentler pressure in my forehead. Then we did it for real, with me facing away so I didn’t know who was sending. I narrated what I felt, “A stronger pressure in my forehead, so that must be T.” I turned around, and M had been sending. Then she explained that she had changed her energy to match T’s energy, just to see what would happen.

Later in the class, when M was receiving, one of her senders tried to do the same thing, matching the other sender’s energy. But M wasn’t fooled. She explained how, yes, the superficial layers of the sender’s signature had changed, but that the deeper layers of the signature stay the same. Which is exactly how I explain signature scale.

And I realized: When I’m making connections outside myself, to a healing client or a spirit or anything else, I have a fine awareness of the deeper layers of signature. But I haven’t developed that same awareness for energy inside my body.

I set about developing that awareness. One approach would have been to meditate on my energy, feeling it, practicing until I could discern the deeper layers of the signature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But because I’ve already done the work to become consciously aware of my ethereal muscles (the parts of my mind that drive energy), I can take a more conscious, faster path.

My plan: To sense energy outside myself, I create a network of sensory connections. Let’s make one of those networks inside my body, in all the different energy structures and pathways I use in my practice. And let’s make that network stable, so it’s just always there, and I don’t have to create it again every time, and so it’s worthwhile to make it really good.

To create that network of sensory connections, I engaged three ethereal muscles: One that actually creates sensory connections, and two that work with energy in my body. In the past, I would have had to guide the actual creation of that network, feeling each location I wanted a sensory connection and guiding it to be placed. But after two decades of that, my ethereal muscles just know how to do it, and I was able to tell the connection-creating muscle, “Make a network of sensory connections in every structure handled by these other two muscles.”

(I also specified that the network should sense a broad range of signatures, not just my own.)

It took several hours to set up the network, then I let it rest overnight to become more stable. The next day, I started looking around the energy in my body, using another ethereal muscle designed for communicating this sort of information to my mind. And I ran into my first problem: In becoming aware of all the different structures and layers of my energy field, I was trying to sense far too many different things at once, and my ethereal muscles couldn’t process all that data.

Again, I had a few options: Practice, and let my ethereal muscles slowly learn the task. (Reasonable, but slow.) Simplify the network of sensory connections, getting less detail, though still probably more detail than someone who hasn’t consciously created a sensory network. (A reasonable backup.) Instead of either of those, I decided to upgrade my ethereal muscles, working with the spirits who upgraded my ethereal muscles earlier this year.

I asked about upgrades to view large amounts of data, and they came through. It took two days to install and power all the new modules, another day of slowly using the ethereal muscles before I was able to even start viewing a single layer of my energy body. Then for the next week or so, I would pick one layer of my energy body per day, practice looking around it, and feel my ethereal muscles stretch as they worked to interpret all the signatures I was sensing. Each day, this started out exhausting, and by the end of each day, my ethereal muscles had come to recognize the signatures in that layer of my energy body and could display it to me, not easily, but without too much difficulty.

I ran into another bump after writing this: Each ethereal muscle has a set of connections to my brain’s energy layer that it uses to communicate with me. The ethereal muscle that synthesizes all that data and displays it to my mind, which I call my “view muscle,” had too much data to send to my brain, and too few connections to send it along. It took two days to fix this, first learning how to find the correct areas in my brain’s energy layer to connect it to, then creating the new connections and ensuring they’re all powered properly.

Looking back on all this, what stands out to me is how each step of this process — creating the sensory network, upgrading the ethereal muscle for viewing the data, and adding bandwidth for it to send that information to my brain — each of those steps took me months or years to learn. And each of those techniques, in turn, were based on other techniques I’d developed earlier. That’s the essence of engineering: Building a technique, then using it as a step in building a larger, more complex technique. It makes my work today hard to explain, and I’ve been thinking about how to teach all of the techniques that go into work like this.

What do you think? Do you want more posts like this, on the techniques I’m developing today? Do you want more posts with practical advice and exercises for people new to my work? Something else? Let me know in the comments.

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

The 3 Main Techniques I Use to Feel Energy

Monday, April 3rd, 2017

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

When I first felt energy, it was a tingling, a pleasant pressure. I had a notion of different types of energy, which I call signatures and others call colors or frequencies, but I couldn’t feel the difference back then.

I think a lot of practitioners are in that situation, feeling energy intuitively, wanting to feel it more precisely but not knowing how. It didn’t come naturally to me — I had to figure it out over a couple of decades. If you’re in that situation, trying to figure out techniques to feel energy more precisely, here are the techniques that worked for me:

Single Intuitive Connection: This is where I started, connecting to objects (the body, a tree, a spirit) and feeling their energy, without thinking about what exactly I was feeling or how I was doing it.

(Terminology: “The thing I’m connected to” is too long. We’ll call that “the object,” understanding that it might not be a physical object you can pick up.)

Quieting My Energy: In my late teen years, I wondered what I was feeling when I felt energy. Was it just the object’s energy? Or was it some combination of its energy, my reaction, and unconscious changes to my own energy? After posing the question, it was obviously the combination. So I practiced quieting my energy, holding it steady and unchanging while I listened. That way, any changes I felt would come from the object, not from myself. I spent several years learning this, and still use it today. When you practice this, remember that the point isn’t to reduce your energy, just to steady it. If you think of your energy as a body of water, you want it to be calm, not empty.

Multiple Connections: Sometimes spirits would connect to me and drain my energy. To chase the spirit away, I needed to follow the spirit’s connection back to it. This was sometimes easy, but sometimes a more skillful spirit would use a complex connection that would shift its signature, and I had trouble following the connection through that shift. I needed a way to discern the new signature of the spirit’s connection. So I developed a technique: At the point where I lost the connection, I’d make many of my own connections, each with a different signature. Usually, one of my connections would match the new signature of the spirit’s connection, and I’d feel my connection touching the spirit’s connection. (If not, I’d make even more connections, in an even broader range of signatures.)

This became my technique for following all types of connections, not just from spirits, but also the connections from my own ethereal muscles to my mind, the connections that provide power to those ethereal muscles, and the connections of any other energetic structure I was trying to understand. As often happens, a technique I developed for one purpose (defense) wound up being far more useful elsewhere.

Splitting the Signature: This is going to be a bit technical. A connection has a signature. It only senses energy in that signature. If the connection’s signature matches the object’s signature, we say it is aligned, and I feel the object strongly. If the connection’s signature is similar to the object’s signature, but doesn’t match it well, we say it is partially aligned, and I feel the object weakly. The problem is, if I’m feeling a weak (partially-aligned) signature, I have to guess at what changes would make the signature more fully aligned, which is slow and often fails.

In my 20s, I developed a technique to solve this. Rather than using one connection that has the full signature, I break the signature down into its components, and make one connection per component. I align each component individually, then combine them into the full signature. This is more precise and reliable than trying to align the whole signature at once, and gives me a clearer view of the energy structures I’m working with.

By splitting those components into sub-components, I can get an even better-aligned signature, with an even clearer view. For the past decade or so, much of my work with sensory connections has focused on using smaller and smaller connections, with smaller and smaller sub-components of signatures. (I’ve previously talked about this as signature scales, from a large-scale full signature to small-scale sub-components.)

Summary: That was a quick overview of roughly two decades of work. For those of you developing sensory techniques yourself, I hope this gave you some ideas. And for everyone else, I hope you enjoyed seeing how I built the tools I use to explore energy.

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

How I Sense Energy: Notes from Teaching a Friend

Monday, September 26th, 2016

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

When I sense energy, I use a technique called sensory connections, which gives a more precise sense than just feeling energy intuitively. A friend, trained in Ayurveda and Marma, is learning the technique for her practice, and I want to share some notes from our session:

We all work with the same ethereal structures (though we call them different names). You can use sensory connections with Marma or other practices to more precisely view the structures you’re working with.

Here’s the basic sensory connection: Make a connection like you’d use to send energy, but instead of sending energy, just listen. Keep your energy steady, quiet, not low energy but just not shifting. Feel the signature of the energy on the other end of the connection. Many practitioners, including my friend, already do this intuitively.

In practice, we’ll use a network of connections throughout the area we’re working with (such as a person’s knee). Each connection feels the energy signature of one point in that area’s biofield.

The signature of the sensory connection should match the signature of whatever you’re sensing.

To match a signature, we need to talk about signature scale. Think of the overall signature as being like a molecule, made of atoms, made of electrons protons and neutrons. You can get an OK match if you align your signature to their signature at the biggest scale (molecules, in that analogy), but you get a much better match if you align at a smaller scale (protons in the analogy), then use that alignment to build the signature up to the large-scale again.

More on matching signature: You’ll feel when a connection aligns well, when it aligns badly, or when it’s somewhere in between. So take the connection you want to use, break it down into its elements (electrons and protons in the analogy), and see which of those elements align well. Keep those, toss out the others. Then try combining those elements in various ways (to create atom-scale in the analogy), see which align well, keep them and throw out the rest. Repeat until you have a full signature.

I keep saying “in the analogy” because we’re not aligning to atoms or protons. It’s an analogy, not a scientific statement.

The smaller you go when you align, the clearer the view is. A lot of getting better with sensory connections is about aligning smaller scales (analogy: quarks, which make up protons).

Each tissue will have a different signature. With practice, you can learn the signature of muscle vs tendon vs bone energy. To start, touch your thigh (or other big muscle), connect, feel the skin and muscle, and learn to recognize their signatures. Then move on to a joint — you’ll recognize the muscle and skin already, plus you’ll see some new signatures correspond to tendon / ligament (they have very similar signatures) and cartilage. Use an anatomy book to help identify the tissues.

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

The Technique I Use for Sensing Energy

Monday, June 6th, 2016

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

Most of my work builds on one technique: Sensory connections. That’s what I use to observe the biofield, energy, ethereal structures, and everything else I work with. Today I’m going to discuss how they work, how I developed them, and the first few steps of learning the technique yourself.

Here’s the basics: Energy seems to follow connections, and energy workers often send energy along a connection. With sensory connections, we make a connection (to a person’s knee, for example) and absorb a tiny amount of their knee’s energy to measure it. It’s like how a thermometer absorbs a tiny amount of heat to measure temperature. In practice, I’ll use a whole network of connections, sensing the biofield of each tissue in the knee, or feeling the structure of a person’s ethereal muscles and the ethereal software or spirits they’re connected to.

But it didn’t start out like that. In my teens, I would look at a person and connect to them. It wasn’t really a technique, just something that came naturally, as it does for many people. And I’d connect to people, trees, spirits, feel their energy, wonder about what was happening.

The first sensory connection was simply quieting my energy. That’s the term I used then, “quieting,” meaning to hold my own energy steady in my body, and to not push energy out the connection, so any change, any movement, any energy on the connection came from whatever I was connected to, not me. I think I spent several years just playing with quieting my own energy, quieting my connections, and learning to listen to the energy.

Golden Gate BridgeAt the time I didn’t know much about shielding, and spirits would sometimes drain my energy. I’d feel their connection, feel my own energy getting wonky, and I wanted to follow the connection back to the spirit to chase it off. So I developed a technique: Starting from where I felt the spirit’s connection, I’d make a bunch of connections all around it and feel for which one of them was touching the spirit’s connection (which had a distinct signature). I’d keep that one, drop the others, and repeat, building up a set of my own connections all along the spirit’s connection, spaced close together, like the supports of a suspension bridge. When I got to the spirit, I’d send it an intense energy in an odd signature, unpleasant enough to get it to stop bothering me.

I called that technique “tracing” a connection, and it may have been my first technique ever. And just like today, I practiced each step until it became automatic, first learning to find which of my connections had hit the spirit’s connection, then making another set of connections and repeating. Today that entire process is unconscious, and I’d forgotten how difficult it was at first, but looking back as I write this post, it was just as hard as anything I’m learning today. I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately, and recalling this feels satisfying, like the techniques I find hard now will one day come just as easily.

I don’t recall when I changed from tracing a connection (a 1-D line) to viewing a whole 3D region. I know I had that by the time I focused on energy healing in my late 20s, and recall how hard it was to view a 3D region in someone else — I’d mostly worked on myself, my own ethereal muscles and mind and other structures, and had to adjust everything to the other person’s signature to view them properly. It took about a year to get comfortable with that.

Along the way I also learned to connect to the body, mind, and ethereal structures (each uses a different type of connection, with a different underlying signature), and learned to follow connections that started as one type then shifted to another. And in my 30s, my focus was on using smaller and smaller connections (the smaller my sensory connection, the more precisely I can view whatever I’m looking at) and on precisely matching the signature of whatever I was looking at (“signature alignment”).

For the readers already exploring Direct Magick: Hopefully this gives you some ideas and guidance around how to sense all of the ethereal structures we work with. Comment or email and let me know which step you’re on, and I’ll see about posting more details.

And for everyone else: I hope you enjoyed this quick tour through one of the foundational techniques of Direct Magick, and that it showed you one way that Direct Magick is different from other systems, and that maybe you got some ideas to try in your own work.

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

The Essence of Direct Magick

Sunday, August 2nd, 2015

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

Follow-up to Four-Dimensional Magick.

I’m often asked what it’s like to do Direct Magick. What do I see? How does it feel? I want to share some of those details today.

Previously, I wrote about four-dimensional magick. Not “beings from another dimension,” but the higher-dimensional spaces used in math and physics. My example was energy healing, but 4D views come up everywhere. And these make great examples of what it’s like to do Direct Magick.

Creating Sensations

The previous 4D post grew from my current work with creating sensations.

A little background. You know how people who work with energy feel energy, and people who don’t work with energy don’t feel it, and how that’s not great for our credibility? I’d like to fix that. If we can understand why non-energy-users don’t feel energy — what the differences are and which is the active ingredient — we could build a technique to bridge that gap, producing sensations in most of the population. I did some work on this in early 2014, learned to create unpleasant headaches in a non-mage friend, then got distracted with other projects.

I’m resuming the project now. While I was re-awakening my ethereal muscles from the months of rest, I asked my spirits to test sensation techniques on me. It let me contribute even while I recovered, and it let them see which approaches produced which types of sensations. The goal was to learn to create pleasant sensations in me, so I could feel better asking friends to be guinea pigs.

We’re making good progress. Our focus is on the paths from aura to mind, and that’s where we run into four dimensions. Remember last post we talked about the ethereal paths from the nerves up to aura? Well, there are also ethereal paths from aura to the mind, and these aura-to-mind paths seem to be responsible for sensations.

The spirits had been starting at a single point in my aura, finding the paths from that point to my mind, and doing the effect on them. It worked OK. Then as I recovered, I tried connecting to a whole region of my aura, and to all the paths from that region to my mind. It was hard, and I couldn’t apply the signature very well, but it still created a clearer, more obvious sensation. That was 2 weeks ago. Since then, I’ve been practicing connecting to larger regions and finding all the paths to my mind. Soon, I’ll call the spirits back and we’ll test the technique.

But this post is about 4D views, and that’s what we have here: My aura is 3D, just like my physical body. From each point within the region of my aura, we have paths to my mind, a series of 3D snapshots as we follow those paths. That’s a total of 4 dimensions.

(For anyone practicing this at home: It’s actually 5D. Each point in aura has multiple paths, probably one path to each receiving point in my mind. Remember, one path is a 1D line, and multiple paths are 2D, a set of lines drawn on a sheet of paper. So each point has 2D worth of paths. And we have those paths flowing out of each point in a 3D aura, for a total of 5D. I’m not good enough at this to handle 5D yet, so I group the paths-to-mind together and pretend they’re just one path, giving me a simpler 4D view. But just a heads up: This doesn’t stop at 4D.)

So, this comes up in sensations. Where else?

Awakening Ethereal Muscles

I spent much of my 20s awakening my ethereal muscles, which involves two different 4D views.

The first view will feel familiar: We have my brain (3D) with ethereal paths leading to my ethereal muscles. Like the paths to aura, this is a 4D view, which you can see as a series of 3D snapshots. I used this view to connect my ethereal muscles to my brain, which let me guide newly-awakened ethereal muscles.

Ethereal muscles also have pathways that provide them power. Think of them like blood vessels, providing nutrients to the (ethereal) muscles. In newly-awakened ethereal muscles, these power pathways are often closed. To open them, you start from the ethereal muscles (3D), trace up the power pathways (series of 3D snapshots = 4D view), and open any blocked areas.

A related technique to find new ethereal muscles: Start from an awake ethereal muscle. Trace up those power pathways until you find a branch that’s blocked. Then trace down that branch to find new, inactive ethereal muscles.

Ethereal muscles are special-purpose. They’re like brain modules in that way, only instead of being specialized for language or facial recognition or muscle movements, they’re specialized for making connections to moving energy or communicating with spirits. That’s why I spent those years awakening my ethereal muscles, and why ethereal-muscle-awakening is one of the foundational techniques of Direct Magick. And it all involves 4D views.

Communication

Quick primer on communication: As you think, your brain activity creates tiny energy signatures. By gathering those energy signatures and packaging them in a special way, you can send them to someone else. If they know how to place those signatures into their own brain, they can read your message.

To gather those energy signatures, I’ve created a network of connections going from my ethereal muscles to my brain. Once again, we have a 3D brain with a connection rising from each point.

You might be asking: How do I keep track of all these connections? We make connections throughout the brain or body, throughout my aura or ethereal muscles, and throughout the pathways connecting them. That’s hundreds or thousands (or more) of tiny connections, each sensing the signature at one spot in this large 4D picture. How do I keep track of them?

Mostly unconsciously. Sure, when I first learned to make a sensory connection, I consciously stepped through the technique. But after practicing a few hundred times, it became unconscious. Same with following the pathways from nerves to aura, or following pathways in general — at first, I’d consciously notice each time the signature changed, consciously adjust my sensory connection to match that change. But with practice it became unconscious.

Think about it like typing: To hit the ‘e’ key, I tense and relax multiple muscles in my forearm, hand, and the 3 joints of my finger. My brain sends a series of signals, multiple times each second, to direct each of these muscles. It does that for each of the hundreds of letters in this article. But that all happens. Touch typing starts out conscious and slow, but with practice, the motions become unconscious and automatic. Same with sensory connections.

You’ll also notice, my brain has specialized modules for moving my fingers. Even when I started typing, I didn’t think “tense these 3 muscles in my finger for 1/4 second,” I just thought about where to move my finger. A specialized module in my brain converted that intent into particular muscle movements.

Same with ethereal muscles: Each ethereal muscle is specialized for some task. When I found the ethereal muscle for controlling sensory connections, this became much easier. Later, I found another ethereal muscle that worked with that first one to control networks of sensory connections, and it became even easier. I couldn’t do most of what I do today without having awakened those muscles, just like I couldn’t type without the brain modules for controlling my fingers.

And, again like learning to type, even though I had specialized modules to handle moving my finger / moving a connection, I still had to practice how I wanted them to move. How to hit the ‘e’ key, or how to follow a pathway as it changes signature. Eventually it all became unconscious, but my unconscious needed to be trained before it could do any of it.

The Essence of Direct Magick

That’s the pattern: Any time I’m using sensory connections with the human body (or another 3D object), I wind up with four dimensions.

Which brings us to something I’ve been wanting to share: Direct magick isn’t about ethereal software. Software is a useful tool, but not the essence of what I do.

Direct Magick is about doing magick directly, without ethereal software. It’s about connecting to the tissue you’re healing, creating a network of sensory connections and figuring out what signature to apply where to heal the person. It’s about connecting to the ethereal muscle you’re awakening, creating a network of sensory connections and opening up blockages in the power pathways. Direct magick is about connecting directly to whatever we’re working on, instead of focusing on intent or doing a ritual.

Why? Well, if we focus on intent, our ethereal muscles will do whatever comes naturally, and our ethereal software will do whatever it’s programmed to do. Sometimes that’s good, but sometimes we want a new technique, something slow and unnatural at first (like touch typing) that eventually produces faster, better results (like touch typing). By consciously guiding our ethereal muscles, we can train them in new movements which (eventually) become unconscious and automatic.

Solving new problems by creating new movements with our ethereal muscles. That’s the essence of Direct Magick.

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

4-Dimensional Magick

Sunday, July 19th, 2015

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

Imagine one nerve cell. Above it are ethereal structures. Tubes, or pathways, coming out of the cell Each time the nerve fires, it creates some biofield energy, which these ethereal pathways carry to the person’s aura. When we do healing work, we put energy in the aura, letting it filter down through those pathways to the cells. Advanced healing techniques act on the pathways themselves, helping the energy reach the cells more quickly, powerfully, and precisely.

Now imagine a chain of nerve cells, all in a line, carrying a signal from the hand to the brain. Each nerve has its own ethereal pathways leading to its own piece of the person’s aura. That’s two dimensions: Horizontal is the chain of nerves, and vertical is the ethereal structures leading to the aura. Like a picture in a magazine.

What if we’re applying healing energy to all the nerves in an area of skin? We’ll have a flat sheet of skin, with the ethereal paths and aura rising above it. This is a 3D picture — 2D of flat skin, and the third dimension is the ethereal paths and aura.

And what if we want to work with all the nerves throughout the person’s body? That’s when we need four dimensions. Here’s why:

There are nerves throughout the body, so you need three dimensions for the physical nerves. Then each nerve has its own ethereal pathways leading to the aura. Except here, the ethereal pathways can’t be “up.” Up is already used — up from my bicep is either my deltoid (going up the arm), or my skin (going out). Either way, the ethereal structures can’t be there, because my deltoid and my skin have their own ethereal structures.

Image of CT brain scan

CT scan slices via Wikipedia.

To visualize this, think of a brain scan. As the scan sweeps through the brain, it presents slices — 2D images that add up to the 3D brain. To visualize a 4D ethereal structure, you would have a series of 3D slices. The first would show the ethereal structures immediately touching the person’s cells, then the next would move a bit along those paths, then a bit farther, until you’re at the person’s aura. (For anyone doing this: Look for spots where the ethereal pathways split or quickly change signatures. These makes excellent points for 3D slices.)

Lost? Here’s an excellent video explaining the fourth dimension in a video game.

I first thought about 4D magick as a teen, for visualizing energy healing (probably). It wasn’t terribly useful. Remember, visualizations only communicate intent to your unconscious mind, then let the unconscious handle the details. The added details of 4D didn’t help my unconscious, and the added complexity probably detracted from my results. If you’re visualizing, just use a good representation, a 2D body with ethereal structures rising out of it. Keep it simple.

But these days, all my magick involves sensory connections. Here, accuracy matters. First, a quick primer on sensory connections:

We all know about sending energy along a connection. A sensory connection is when you make a connection but don’t send energy along it. Instead, let it absorb a bit of energy from whatever it’s connect to, not enough to drain anyone, just enough to feel the energy signature there. Now it’s sensing that signature.

For practical healing techniques, I make a network of sensory connections throughout the body, to each group of cell’s ethereal pathways, then another set of connections a little bit out along those pathways, and another set of connections farther up, until we reach the aura. It’s like the brain scan, taking a snapshot at each point along those paths. And since each snapshot is a 3D body, the overall map is 4D. That’s what I use to guide my energy healing.

Note that sensory connections are different than just visualizing the ethereal body, just like how touching an object is different than visualizing that object. That’s why 4D matters here: When you’re reaching out to touch the ethereal structures, instead of just visualizing them, it’s important to mentally track everything you’re touching. And since you’re working with 4D objects, that means mentally working in four dimensions.

I’ve used this for energy healing, for awakening ethereal muscles, and this week I’m using it for creating sensations. I’ll give some examples of working in four dimensions next week.

(You may have noticed, this is 4 dimensions in the mathematical sense, not as in “beings from another dimension.” Yes, I sneakily taught you math. Mea culpa.)

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

Better Sensory Networks (My Work Sept 13-19)

Saturday, September 20th, 2014

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.

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

(Not) Filling in the Blanks

Monday, March 17th, 2014

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

This week, I’m learning to watch nerves, to read their energy signature and figure out what the person is feeling. It (hopefully) leads to creating sensations in the body, and possibly recognizing and altering mental states.

The hardest part? Sensing the energy, instead of seeing what I expect to see. Because I mostly know what I’ll see, based on how my own body feels, or the person’s posture. It’s easy to fill in the blanks. Of course, the whole point of sensing the energy is for the times when your expectations are wrong…

Learning communication was similar. I’d receive the message, read a few concepts, then start writing. I thought I was reading the message, but really, I was writing what I expected to hear, based on those first few concepts.

The solution? It’s simple, but not easy. Learn the technique, to read the message or sense the nerves. Then, slow down, step through the technique, practice each step. Do that 100 times, and your ethereal muscles will learn the motions, and they’ll start doing the proper technique unconsciously. Muscle memory, I suppose.

That’s the big lesson from communication: Slowing down isn’t enough. I had to learn the right technique. Without that, slowing down just means doing the wrong technique more slowly.

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

How I Develop New Techniques

Wednesday, September 12th, 2012

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

Last week, we talked about building new, unintuitive techniques based on substeps our mental muscles already know how to do. Today, I want to talk about how I build those techniques, and answer Barracuda Surf’s question:

Maybe some steps come naturally to you but they may not for everyone. I would enjoy “baby steps for dummies” explanations to try to put in practice and tests your models/theories.

I like this quote because it illustrates the difference between the way I actually develop new techniques, and the way I explained it. Barracuda seems to want a list of all the substeps I use for energy healing, so he can step through the technique and get the same results. But I can’t do that.

The first issue is scale: Energy healing has around 10 steps, starting with finding energy of the injured tissue, which has roughly 10 substeps (connect to various tissues, read signatures, and so on). Each of those has around 10 substeps (making a network of connections to scan an area, quieting those connections so you can sense the energy, etc), and so on. Depending on how basic you want to get, you wind up with 1000 or more steps, and it’s no longer practical to write down, or even use.

But that’s not even the real reason. The real reason is, I can only learn one new technique at the time. Before I could even think about finding the energy of the injured tissue, I had to learn sensory connections. Not just read the series or memorize the steps of the procedure — I had to practice until it became easy and automatic, because otherwise, I would have far too much to keep track of as I did the healing technique.

That series has 5 sets of exercises. The first builds on baby steps, more or less. The 2nd builds on the 1st, and the 3rd builds on the 2nd, and so on. In other words, by the time we use sensory connections, we’re already 5 levels above baby steps. And energy healing builds another 1-2 levels on top of that. It’s just impractical to learn it all at once, and no one would want to read that post.

Very little of direct magick is intuitive at first. At least, that was my experience of it. Most of the techniques I talk about have to be developed, not simply visualized. Knowing the right technique helps, and that’s what I try to give you in this blog and in my books, but each mage still has to practice the techniques until their mental muscles grasp them, one at a time, from baby steps up to useful magick.

Wow, that post was kind of a bummer, huh? All work and no play. Here’s the good news: Magick based on ethereal software is much simpler. I can step you through it in about 150 pages, starting from baby steps. In fact, I’m already writing that book. Look for it around the end of the year, and look for new excerpts to start posting later this week.

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

What I Do Instead of Visualization

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

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

So far, we’ve talked about why I don’t use visualization in magick. Today, let’s talk about what I do instead.

First, I engage my mental muscles using mental posture. Then I connect to whatever ethereal software I want to use, based on its name. (The first time I encounter ethereal software, I name it, and to go back there, I just think the name while engaging the mental muscles for communication). I know the steps my mental muscles take to connect to the software, but I do this so often that I don’t have to consciously guide each step anymore.

(At some point, I’ll have so much software that naming each one won’t work. I’m not there yet, though.)

If I’m working with another person, like for healing sessions, I also connect to them. Usually, I focus on their signature, or on a picture, though sometimes I use a special ethereal software to help with these connections.

Then I listen: What message is the ethereal software sending me? (Usually it says, “Ready to go.”) Has the software connected to me properly? What part of the person have I connected to? (More on that below.) On the whole, what is the state of my connections to the things I want to work with?

Usually, the ethereal software is good to go, but my connection to the person is in the wrong location. So, I’ll connect to other areas of their energy body until I find something I recognize (like the energy of a particular organ), then move from there to the area of the injury. Today, looking around is a single thought that encompasses both seeing and directing the action, but let me step you through the process, the same way I stepped through it as I was first learning to look around the body:

  1. Direct my mental muscles to make more connections to the energy of adjacent tissues in the person’s body. (This is itself a technique I had to develop and practice, involving tracing paths and broadening signatures, but that’s too much detail to go into here.)
  2. Listen to all the energy signatures of tissues you’re now connected to. (Note: It takes practice to recognize different tissues based on their signature. I’d already learned that skill by the time I developed this procedure.)
  3. Consciously decide which tissue to connect to, based on the type of tissue and your best guess at the location. Hope it’s in the direction you want to travel. (I usually pick nerves, orienting myself based on the spine and brain.)
  4. Repeat this until you’ve found what you’re looking for, which is either a particular tissue to orient yourself (like the brain) or the area of the injury.

Over time, this procedure became natural, and today I don’t really think about each step. Kind of like how you stop thinking about a dance move after practicing it a few dozen times. Of course, if you never consciously stepped through the movements and practiced it slowly, you’d never be able to do it quickly — you can’t just skip to the end.

Once I find the energy of the injured tissue, I’ll ask my mental muscles what signatures they instinctively want to use on it. Then I’ll look at the injury and consciously think about what signatures look right, ask my mental muscles about those changes, and repeat a few times until I’m happy with everything.

That’s really what my magick looks like: Listen, take one very small step, listen some more, and repeat. When you actually set those healing signatures into the tissue, it’s the same idea: Ask your mental muscles to make a small change, watch what they do, verify it was correct, and repeat. With practice, the process becomes unconscious (just like a practiced dance move), and the ask-watch-verify cycle speeds up. Today, it takes about one second, and I’m not aware of each individual step. But they’re still there, handled by my mental muscles, just like the steps of a well-practiced dance move are handled by the dancer’s motor memory.

What about magick based on ethereal software? Same thing: I send an instruction, receive a reply, then send another instruction. Again, I take very small steps, verifying each one (based on the software’s reply and whatever I can watch of what it’s doing).

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Visualization seems much simpler.” And indeed, it is. This approach was never designed to be simple, it was designed to let me consciously guide my mental muscles through new techniques. As a result, it’s more precise than other approaches, and with practice, also faster, because you’re not tied to rituals, and you don’t have to focus on symbols for long periods. But it has a difficult learning curve.

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up this series by discussing how exactly I direct my mental muscles, and why I don’t use visualization there, either.

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