Posts Tagged ‘Signatures’

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How I’m Creating Advanced Versions of Basic Energy Techniques

Monday, June 19th, 2017

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I’m exploring techniques to build, move, and project energy that other practitioners can feel.

“Hold on,” you say. “Aren’t those the basics of energy work? Don’t you already know all that?”

I do. But I want a better version: More reliable, less tiring, capable of creating exactly the energy signature I need (so I can explore different signatures and find the most useful ones). I want to understand exactly how each step works, then I want to improve them. So I’m using all the advanced tools I have to redesign this basic technique.

Step 1: New Ethereal Muscles

The spirits I work with rarely work with humans. And, like all spirits, they don’t have bodies. The result is, they didn’t have an ethereal muscle designed for using to energy in one’s body. (This may be why I haven’t gone very far with embodied energy until now.)

My first step was to get a dedicated ethereal muscle. But that’s not something I can do myself — ethereal muscles are complicated, and intending to make one doesn’t help. This was almost entirely on the spirits I work with, and my main contribution was asking the right questions and finding spirits who found this project interesting. They took it from there, talking with other spirits who do work with humans, getting a bunch of ethereal muscles for working with energy in the body, then synthesizing the insights from all those ethereal muscles into one new muscle for me. That’s what I’m working with today.

(I also did some work with powering the new ethereal muscle and connecting it to my brain. Some details here and here.)

Step 2: Enhanced Energy Storage

Here’s how most of those ethereal muscles work: They store energy created by the cells of one’s body, then release that stored energy when it’s needed. It’s a good solution, but it only provides a limited amount and intensity of energy. As I practiced with this energy, I’d get exhausted quickly, and need to wait until the next day for these reserves to recharge. (This may be why practitioners are so often warned to not use their own energy for healing techniques.)

I wanted more power. And I already have a power source, provided by the spirits I work with, that powers my ethereal muscles and some energy structures in my body. Could we use that?

We started with a simple solution: Create structures to store this power from the power source. Release it when I want to use energy, and convert* that power to energy. I used this for a couple of months, and it was good enough.

*What does it mean to convert power to energy? Recall that energy has a signature, and the signature has different scales. If we think of an energy signature as a painting, then you can zoom in on one color of paint, and zoom in more to the molecules that make up that paint color, and zoom in more to the atoms that make up those molecules. Power is what happens when you keep zooming in. It’s like energy without the signature. To convert power to energy means to give that power a signature. I’ve discussed this some here.

But even with a power source, if I used this energy for a half-hour or more, I’d still run out and have to wait for the power to recharge. I wrote in my notes, “Something must be wrong. People build and use energy all the time, and they would have a fraction of the power reserves I have now. I must be wasting the stored power somehow.”

I stepped through the technique, watched each step, and found the problem: I was releasing the stored power into my body, then converting it to energy. But there was a lag, and most of the power was dissipating into my body, unused, with no signature to cause any sensations or other results. I needed a way to capture all the power and give it a signature before releasing it.

Talking with my spirits again, we wound up with a two-chamber structure to store the power. The first chamber is the same as before, it stores power. Then when I want to turn that power into energy energy, the first chamber releases a small amount of power into the second chamber, where it’s contained, turned into energy, then released into my body. After designing this solution, they updated my ethereal muscle to know how to create and use these two-chamber structures, and my ethereal muscle set it all up more-or-less automatically while I rested. Since then, I haven’t come close to running out of power, and I have much better control of how much energy I create and how quickly I release it into my body.

One thing to watch out for: Last weekend, I built energy like this, didn’t use all of it, and got distracted. A few hours later, I was feeling pretty lousy. The energy in that second chamber had gone bad — I think the signature had degraded, leaving me with energy in a signature that wasn’t healthy for my body. After I flushed out those energy storage structures, I felt much better. It’s a similar concept to grounding, but a different spot to do it.

Note: Flushing those structures is important, even if you don’t bother with grounding. For years, I’ve built energy that matches my body’s signature well enough that there’s no need to release / eliminate / ground the energy. But even still, unused energy that’s stored, not in the body, can degrade and cause problems.

This seems like a good length for a post. Next week, I’ll talk about upgrades to moving and projecting energy, how I overloaded my ethereal muscle and how I fixed it.

Update: Part 2 is here.

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 1 Comment »

How I Sense Energy: Notes from Teaching a Friend

Monday, September 26th, 2016

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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.

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More Techniques for Physical Effects (My Work August 9-15)

Friday, August 15th, 2014

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

This week, I finished improving the way I shift signatures.

Shifting a signature isn’t useful on its own. But it’s a key step in energy healing, creating sensations, and lots of other magick. Improving how I do this step gets me better results with every technique that uses it.

Years ago, I shifted signatures by building energy in the desired signature, then send it to the person’s aura*. Last year, I changed to using a network of connections throughout the person’s aura — shifting the signature of that network would shift the aura’s signature, too. Earlier this month, I started using two networks, one to do the shift and the other to watch. And that same week, I started focusing on how I aligned to the person’s signature. (Remember the picture-made-of-pictures metaphor.)

*All these techniques work for any ethereal structure you’re trying to shift. But that’s a mouthful. So I’ll just talk about shifting auras, and trust you to know this is more general.

All those improvements were following a training plan I got from the spirits I work with. This week, I finished that training plan. That means two things: (1) I get to use this technique for a while, instead of always learning something new and then updating all the techniques that use it, and (2) the spirits I work with open up more about what they know each time I complete a training plan, so I expect that to happen this time, too.

The final steps of the training plan involved aligning to the person’s signature at a very small scale, then doing the shifting at no more than 3 scales larger than that alignment. Essentially, smaller scale = better alignment, and 3 scales above is an arbitrary-but-convenient cutoff. It produces a faster, smoother signature shift, which is what really matters.

So far, calming myself and healing techniques for a knee were easier than before, and consciousness integration was dramatically easier. (Warning: Old post, inexperienced writing, some old terms.)

Here’s what consciousness integration does: You’re probably familiar with the experience of having part of your mind scared or angry or otherwise in an irrationally negative place. If you could just talk to that part somehow, you would feel so much better, but that’s not an easy thing to do. Some people use hypnosis or ritual to engage that part of the mind. I use consciousness integration. It’s a magick technique to activate pathways from the conscious mind to that irrational, half-conscious part of the mind, so it can communicate with your adult, conscious self.

I haven’t done consciousness integration in a year or more. Back then, it took all my focus for 5-10 minutes, and left me exhausted.

This week, I was having an irrational anger around some of last week’s drama. So I tried consciousness integration. And using the new signature shifting skills, it took maybe 10 seconds to activate the paths, then another minute to let my mind sort everything out. Afterward, I felt good, energized even. A dramatically, obviously better experience.

So much of the magick I do, I’m using every day, barely noticing the incremental improvements. But seeing the difference between a year ago (not knowing any of that signature shifting track), and today (having finished that track), the difference is striking, and satisfying.

Next week: Applying this new signature shifting technique to creating sensations in other people.

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Should I Use Energy When Manifesting?

Wednesday, July 16th, 2014

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Synchronicity asks:

Do you think that energizing the delta signature works well also for manifesting?

It would be an interesting and unique approach, worth exploring, since all mainstream techniques say to focus only on the target signature of “I achieved X!” (+ eventually clearing the current state negativity)

It’s an interesting question. It reveals a fundamental difference in how Direct Magick approaches manifesting.

When I do manifesting, it’s about communication, not energy. I contact ethereal software designed for manifesting, craft a message about what I want, and send it to the software. Getting better results is about (1) choosing your message carefully, so you’re asking for the right things, (2) using good communication techniques, so the software can read the nuances of your message, and (3) using good ethereal software. Energy doesn’t factor in.

(Well, communication involves energy. But the point isn’t to build lots of it. The point is to notice the signature of my mind as I think each concept, then package all those concept-signatures up and send them to the software. Those signatures are delicate, and not the kind of thing I could build lots of in my body.)

So, why do people build energy when doing manifesting? A few possibilities:

  • Building energy gets you into a magickal mindset, which helps engage your ethereal muscles, so it’s useful for just getting your magick moving. (Direct Magick uses mental posture for that.)
  • The visualization gives you something to focus on, which is useful for systems that leave the magick to the unconscious mind. (Which is most systems of magick, but not Direct Magick.)
  • If you’re used to visualizing energy, it’s probably easier to visualize “wealth energy” than to learn a whole new approach.

So, I wouldn’t worry too much about the particular energy used while manifesting, and I wouldn’t expect fancy signature-matching techniques like delta signatures to matter, either.

Got a question? Leave a comment below.

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 4 Comments »

Energy from Nerve Cells (My Work May 3-9)

Friday, May 9th, 2014

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Continuing with sensations in the body, this week I learned more about producing energy in my own body.

First, I learned to pay attention to smaller signatures as I built energy. A bit of background:

There are large signatures, small signatures, and everything in between. It’s like a body, which is made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms. Or a rope, made of twine, which is made of thread. All the scales of a signature are present at each location, and it’s a matter of which you tune into. In general, it requires more focus, practice, and skill to tune into smaller signatures, but you get more precise techniques.

Previously, to build energy in my body, I’d connect to my nerves, engage the ethereal muscle for building energy, and let it do its thing. This week, added a step: After connecting to nerves, I’d adjust my connections to see the small-scale signature of those nerves, then select which small-scale signatures I wanted to build.

Adding that step sounds trivial, but it has a big impact: I not only notice the currently-active signature of my nerves, but also other, currently-inactive but potentially-active signatures. And I can build energy in any of those signatures.

Why does that matter? Previously, I was only using the currently-active signature, so if I wanted to produce energy to calm someone, or arouse them, or produce other sensations, I’d have to get myself into that state first, then produce the energy. Now, with access to inactive signatures, I can select any signature, even ones I’m not experiencing.

But there’s more: Imagine that a person’s normal energy is yellow, and their calm energy is green. To calm them, you don’t want to send them green — they already have a lot of yellow, so adding your green will produce a sort of yellow-green that’s only halfway effective. Instead, you want to send them blue, which will combine with their normal yellow to produce the calm green.

Previously, I could only get green (by calming myself). Now, I can get blue by building energy in only the inactive signatures.

(I call the blue the “delta signature,” because that’s the difference (or “delta”) between their current signature (yellow) and the target signature (green.))

I still need to learn which signature does which state. But now I have the core skills to produce energy in any signature, once I learn what signatures I want.

That was half of my week. I also started learning to make hotter energy.

Hotter? Yes, hotter. Think of energy as hot water. To transfer more heat, you can either send more hot water, or you can send hotter water. According to my trainers and my general sense of things, hotter energy is the way to go, and making more energy probably doesn’t matter. (That sense is related to the general rule that signature matters more than quantity of energy.)

How do you get hotter energy? Well, the “heat” (which I normally call “activation”) comes from two places: The cells themselves, and your core. (And maybe ethereal software for some people.) So, you want to enhance both of those.

I started with the activation from the cells themselves. I engaged those same ethereal muscles, connected at a small scale, then requested energy just from my body, not from core. (If you’re doing this, remember, the words don’t matter — you have to be able to find your core, and know how to control it, before you can isolate your energy source.)

I can’t be sure what happens, but here’s how it looks: Cells constantly produce activation / heat. That activation is stored in some small structures. When I build energy from cells, I’m releasing that activation from those small structures. The cells then refill that activation in a fraction of a second, and I can continue releasing it. This feels rather different than anything I’ve done by visualizing, even when I visualize energy coming out of my cells.

At first, I thought this must be what novices do, before they awaken their core paths. After working with it for a few days, I doubt it. First, it’s exhausting, even after getting a few days of practice. Second, it requires advanced skills — it doesn’t happen just from visualization, and if I connect to my nerves but don’t view the small-scale signature, that doesn’t work either. You need to consciously engage the right ethereal muscles and view your nerves at a small scale, and novices can’t do either. I’ll check soon, but I doubt this is what novices do.

I’m not sure what to do with it yet. There’s no obvious way to get more of this activation / heat from cells. (I do have an obvious way to get more activation through core, which I’ll do next week.)

But I’m kind of excited. Energy produced in this way has a different quality than other energy. One of my trainers described it as, “More closely tied to this world.” It may interact with cells more strongly, which would be useful for sensations and healing. And, because of the steps involved in making it, this energy might even be something new that most people don’t work with. Who knows what I might find?

I’m seeing an energy worker friend tomorrow, so I’ll test this with her. And next week, I’ll awaken more paths through core, which should let me make hotter energy.

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Recognizing Different Energy Signatures

Monday, April 29th, 2013

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Seth is starting to work with energy and grounding. He asks:

I was reading the grounding [post], and how do I know what type of signature of energy I’m building up? You said if its your body’s normal signature, you’ll just feel alert (in the grounding series). For a novice, what sort of signature of energy would be building up by visualizing the mist, would it be the same as the body’s?

This is one of the hardest things I write about: How does energy feel, and how do I know what signature I’m building.

We want to talk about the signature, or type, of energy. Except that energy signature is like color: Almost impossible to describe without referencing another color. Sure, you can say that purple is between blue and red, but if someone is blind, how do you explain color in the first place?

So, the first step is to become non-blind. Start working with energy, start noticing it in the trees and people and everything else around you. Then, when I say, “The signature of inflamed tendons,” you’ll know what that means, just like you know what blue means because you’ve seen it before.

As for what type of energy you would build from visualizing a white mist, it’ll be different for everyone, but if you feel it, it’s not your body’s normal signature, because your body’s normal signature just feels normal.

Why will it be different for everyone? Well, a visualization is way to communicate your intent to your mental muscles, but how they interpret that intent is anyone’s guess. They might make a normal default energy because you think of white as an empty color, or they might make a clean alert energy because you associate white light with daytime and work. Or maybe you associate white with healing, except your mental muscles don’t know what energy does healing, so they make something else. Especially when you’re starting out, it’s hard to know exactly how your mental muscles will respond to any particular visualization, especially one someone else made, since some aspects of it might speak to your unconscious mind, and some aspects might not.

I wish I had simple answers. “Just imagine X and you’ll do Y” is much more palatable than “Look at energy every day, and in a few months, you’ll start to recognize different energies, and then you can learn useful techniques.” But the truth is, magick is an art, and the first step is merely learning to see.

See this post for the basics on sensing energy, and this series for a more advanced technique I’ll rewrite and simplify in my book. And for more energy visualizations, including another one from Seth, see this comment thread.

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Why Not Just Heal Yourself?

Friday, December 7th, 2012

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Yvonne asks:

Is this [healing technique] most effective if the individual uses her own energy, or does one have to come to the magician-healer? Doesn’t the personal signature best support one’s own healing?

The Short Answer

Energy healing is complex. It requires an expert. You need a healer, and that healer should work in the client’s signature.

The Long Answer

But… why? I mean, Yvonne’s point is correct: Your energy should align to your body better than to another person’s energy will. So why not heal yourself?

(This is about to get a bit advanced. You’ve been warned.)

There are really two* signatures involved in energy healing: The underlying signature, and the top-level signature.

The underlying signature determines which person that energy affects. You match it to the client’s underlying signature. Do this wrong and the healing energy won’t affect the client properly. But when you heal yourself, you’re already in the right underlying signature, so you don’t need to think about it.

The top-level signature determines what the healing energy does: Which tissue is affected in what ways. So, working with a burn vs inflammation vs an itch, you’ll have a different top-level signature.

*It’s actually more complex than this, with multiple scales of signatures involved. But I have to make some simplifications, or this post will become unreadably long.

When I first started energy healing, in 2006, working in another person’s underlying signature was hard. It took a few months before I could do it comfortably, and I’d spend afternoons just making connections to friends, matching their signature, then resting and doing it again.

But matching an underlying signature is easy now. In fact, it’s much simpler than the technique I use to shift a structure’s signature. I don’t even think about it anymore — my mental muscles just do it automatically.

It’s the other part of energy healing that’s hard: Figuring out which tissues should you affect, which cellular processes should you aim to increase or decrease, and what top-level signature will cause those changes. This is the intersection of medicine and magick, and it’s where I spend most of my time these days when I do healing work.

So, the full answer to Yvonne’s question is: The hard part of energy healing is figuring out the top-level signature, which requires an expert healer. Yes, working on yourself is slightly easier, because you don’t have to adjust for another person’s underlying signature. But adjusting for that signature is actually pretty easy, compared with all the other steps of the healing.

Note: This post assumes you’re handling the healing technique yourself. If you instead use ethereal software (whether it’s Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, or the healing system I’ll show you in my book), the software will handle both the top-level and underlying signatures, and you don’t have to worry about any of this. In that case, you’ll get the same results whether you heal yourself or another person, so I’d still recommend an expert healer who will be better at commanding the ethereal software.

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3 Surprising Observations about Energy Tingles

Saturday, October 6th, 2012

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We all know the tingling feeling of energy. I discussed it with a non-mage and an experienced psychic recently, then thought about it more today. I surprised each of them, including myself. Here are the observations:

1. Most tingles people feel are really proprioception, or focusing your attention on one spot in your body until you feel weird, or some other non-magickal process. Most of what teachers use to demonstrate energy tingles is really normal physiology. (Which I think is cheating.)

2. Novices often look for tingles to know they’re really doing magick. They think that not feeling tingles means they’re not engaging their mental muscles, which indeed, it may.

The problem is, you don’t feel tingles in response to all energy. Instead, you feel tingles when the energy you’re working with has the wrong signature. That is, you’re not feeling the energy itself, you’re feeling how much it shifts the signature of your body / shielding / connection / whatever you’re working with.

As you get better, you’ll learn to align your energy’s signature with what you’re working with, and you’ll stop feeling tingles. For some mages (including my experienced psychic friend), you may think the absence of tingles means you’re doing something wrong, when in fact, it means you’re improving.

3. The tingles aren’t actually your nerves responding to the energy. Rather, the tingles are your mental muscles projecting sensations into your brain. Really, it’s a way for your mental muscles to communicate with you.

As I’ve gotten better at aligning my signature to what I’m working with, my mental muscles have become more sensitive, so they produce tingles when I mis-align the signature just a little bit. But lately, this simply isn’t enough, and I rarely feel tingles anymore. So, the third idea, which surprised me: Could I tell my mental muscles to produce tingles in response to some other event, such as a communication message coming in? That seems quite useful.

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | 3 Comments »

Renaming Energy, Signature & Structure with Manifesting

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

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I’m still thinking about good metaphor-terms for energy, signature and structure. (Structure is my general term for stable magickal structures, like connections, mental muscles, ethereal software, etc.)

Last time, we explored the main attributes the metaphor should convey:

  • Energy activates structure.
  • There’s no inherent meaning, it’s just a matter of which signatures correspond to which structures, and which structures influence cells (and other things) in which ways.
  • Signature scale, and using it to work with different domains.

Today, I’m thinking about the metaphor. This will be an edited stream-of-consciousness, which may be interesting or dull, depending on how much you enjoy seeing me think through this problem. Feel free to skip it — I’ll write about the metaphor I wind up with in another post.

First, energy makes structures move, which actually feels pretty good as a metaphor. It feels roughly like what other things called “energy” do. Though I’d prefer something a bit more suggestive of electricity on a circuit board, in that the electricity isn’t where the complexity or intelligence lives, and the energy’s role is just to activate the complex circuits. But that’s not terribly important to bake into the terms.

The way energy activates structure — where the signatures have to match — reminds me of neurotransmitters. Serotonin only activates a nerve if that nerve has serotonin receptors; otherwise, it does nothing. Not sure how signature scale would fit in there, though.

In fact, what really does have scales in normal experience? I keep going back to the photo mosaic, where a picture of Abe Lincoln is made of smaller pictures of Abe Lincoln. But is there anything more… useful? Maybe visual recognition?

But scale really is the key insight I want to capture, because it’s a dramatic way that magick::energy isn’t like heat. (Heat heats everything — there’s no matching involved.) Maybe the wavelength of light and a photoreceptor?

Let’s think about signature some. Really, I want to capture that it feels like a Jackson Pollack painting: Intricate, lots of different bits, and each bit is made of something complex. Pattern, maybe? I like that. It lends itself to the idea of “matching the pattern” between energy and structure. It lends itself to scales, where a pattern is made of smaller patterns (fractals and the like). And it captures some of how the feeling is more complex than a single color.

For structure, I’ll talk about something like “atomic pattern,” to convey that the pattern matching isn’t in the overall shape of the structure (that is, the layout of the circuit board), but is rather in the type of material that makes up the structure: A circuit board requires electricity, a forge requires heat, a turbine requires wind, and so on.

That’s the key, I think: Magick::energy isn’t like electricity, or heat, or any one type of energy. It’s an overarching term that encompasses many signatures / patterns. And the energy that works with structures associated with the body is different than the energy for working with structures associated with the mind, with ethereal software, and with other things. Each needs their own energy, with a different small-scale signature, similar to how different tools need different types of power or energy (electricity, heat, kinetic energy, etc).

But you can start with one domain, then shift the signature to another domain. (Domain is my term for “the type of thing you’re working with,” like body vs mind vs spirits.) Shifting the signature is how you can connect to someone’s mind if you start with a connection to their body, for example. I do it all the time, and I wouldn’t want a metaphor that made that sound awkward.

Let’s explore structure. I want to convey that:

  • It is stable.
  • It ties to the physical world, but is not itself physical.
  • It requires energy with the right type / signature / pattern.

Stable is a nice word. I could explore there. But right now, I think I want some manifesting to guide me, like I did with the tagline.

Manifesting: Keep the term “energy.” It is fairly universal and well-understood, it will be an important hook for new readers.

“Signature” is better than most other options. “Pattern” is nice, but there are options better than the both. Let’s explore there.

Manifesting pushes ideas into my thoughts. I get the concept of a sculpture’s shape, and whether it’s angular or smooth. Manifesting says, “Look into art terms. You’ll find something useful there.” It seems to know that it will work better by telling me yes / no on my own ideas, rather than trying to send me exact words. I wish I understood the algorithm better so I could see why that is.

Anyway, back to the word search. Google turns up an art glossary. Manifesting flags some terms as I scroll down:

  • Analogous colors. (Could be useful for describing signatures that match up.)
  • Assemblage, where you build a sculpture from multiple parts. (Like how structures connect up.)
  • Binder, a substance in paint that makes the pigment particles stick together.
  • Etch.
  • Form — explore here for terms for structure.

At this point, I stop, and explore the concept of “form.”

Manifesting: Form is a better concept than structure, because it suggests a shape. You’ll be able to talk about physical forms and mental forms and spirit forms and it will sound natural, while replacing “form” with “structure” in those terms sounds weird.

You can keep the term “structure” as the stand-alone noun, when you’re just talking about “anything solid,” though “solid form” will be better.

Me: What about “stable form”?

Manifesting: That’s good too, though “solid form” is a better image.

I think about it some. It is. Solid form suggests a sculpture. Stable form suggests a building for a horse. So, we have “solid form” for an overarching “anything stable,” then “physical form” and so on for the particulars.

Manifesting: OK, now we need the thing that animates the form. That will be X energy, where X is the same term that goes before “form.” (So, physical form is animated by physical energy, and so on.)

(I take a break here, for anyone comparing my sessions to their own.)

Manifesting: Now for signature. Start with pattern, but explore a bit more. It will be the [something] pattern.

It pushes thoughts into my mind again. It’s an image, like you’re zooming in on a building and as you zoom in, you see all the steel girders and such. The idea of zooming in and seeing the component parts. I ask for the domain of the idea.

Manifesting: With electronics or large-scale objects. Not atoms, that’s the wrong metaphor, you’ll want to talk about atoms elsewhere. Don’t bake it into the pattern.

I go through a few words. Building block, recursive, etc. I get a nod on “constructive pattern.”

Manifesting: Yes. The idea that these small units build up to the larger unit. There’s a word for that.

I try scaling, repeating, recursive, fractal. Scaling is good, but fractal is the best. Manifesting gets excited*.

*Yes, I know this doesn’t match my model where ethereal software is like a computer and doesn’t have emotions. That’s why I wrote it down: Unexpected data is the most important kind of data.

Manifesting: Yes. Fractal pattern. Or just “fractal.” As in “the energy’s fractal.” It will totally capture the concept of a recursive shape, plus it has the right sciencey-sound to go with ethereal software. You’d talk about the form’s fractal, too.

(I end the manifesting session.)

So, in summary, we have:

  • Solid form, or for specific types, physical form, mental form, etc.
  • Energy, again with types, like physical energy, mental energy, etc.
  • Fractal for the type of energy / form, as in “you need to match the energy’s fractal to the form’s fractal,” or “the difference between physical form and mental form is a small-scale difference in the fractal.”

What do you think? (Remember, it’s entirely possible that I made errors in the question I asked, or in receiving the information. Manifesting is complex, and while the ideas are good, I wouldn’t want the manifesting to shut down the conversation.)

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

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Posted in Writing | 8 Comments »

Renaming Energy & Signatures: How Energy Behaves

Monday, May 14th, 2012

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

If you came for a technical guide to energy, skip down to “how energy behaves.”

On my post about renaming the term “energy,” Simon left an excellent question:

Who are these terms for? Is it to gain some respectability so that ‘non magicans’ might look into this stuff and take it seriously? Or is it to orientate people who are already interested and just need a consensus term to use as shorthand.

My overall goal – with the blog and the book — is to develop a group of mages to work with. That includes knowing my terms and concepts, but even more, it’s about being able to use sensory connections and mental muscles and ethereal software and all the other parts that make my techniques work. So that I can post a technique for nergy healing, or personal growth, or observations about connecting to trees, and everyone can try it for themselves and see what happens. Because I really do want independent verification of what I’m seeing, I just need to get you the skills to do it. Also, ideally, other mages in the group would develop their own techniques, post them, and we can all learn from each other.

There are other goals. I want to help people be happier with their own magick, even if we don’t wind up collaborating like that. And long-term, I want to develop magick into a mature, respected discipline. But in the context of the book and the terms I use on the blog, that’s my overall goal.

My goal with these terms is to make my model more intuitive for people who want to go fairly far with the style — work through the whole book, and then push the limits themselves. Which means that I’m looking for a simple metaphor that suggests the actual behavior of each component. Kind of like how it feels natural to say “I reprogrammed the ethereal software,” but if you adopt the energy healer term and “Channel energy from The Universe,” you’d probably never even think to reprogram it. (“I reprogrammed The Universe” sounds more than a bit weird.)

The renaming is also for myself. The terms we use really do matter, and adopting metaphors that feel more natural to me will probably help me explore better.

So, let’s start with the behavior I’m trying to imply with my metaphor.

How Energy Behaves

Energy activates structure. That’s really about it.

“But wait,” you say. “Energy promotes healing, and causes tingly feelings, and does all these other things we’re always talking about.”

Indeed, it does. But it does those things by activating structures. And that is the key to the metaphor I want to convey.

When energy promotes healing, that’s because it activates the magical structures connected to physical cells which causes those cells to grow more quickly, suppress inflammation responses, or some other similar changes. When energy feels tingly, that’s because it activates the structures that connect to nerves and cause a particular type of neural signal.

How does the energy “know” which structures to activate? Signature. Each structure has a signature, and that structures activated by energy with the same signature.

This may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s fairly important. Healing energy doesn’t know that it heals, just like serotonin doesn’t know that it makes people happy. The effect of the energy (or the serotonin) is a consequence of the structures it interacts with. I want a term that focuses us on matching signatures and interacting with individual structures, rather than on the overall goal of what we want the energy to do.

Photo mosaic from wikipedia.

Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photographic_mosaic

On signature, scale is probably the most important thing. You can break the signature down into smaller, simpler signatures. You know those pictures of a person, made of other pictures of that same person? (Photo to right.) It’s likely that, except that each of the smaller pictures are, in turn, made of even smaller pictures. This is what I mean by “the scale of the signature”: How many steps down you’ve gone from the large-scale picture.

Broad-scale signature is the feel of the energy. Smaller-scale signature determines if the energy interacts with ethereal software or a person, with the body or the mind, and so on. (The “domain” of the energy.) This doesn’t come up until you’re fairly far along in learning direct magick, but once it does, it’s quite important.

In general, structures are activated not only by energies that match the large-scale signature, but also energies that match some small-scale signatures. In that case, the activation is less efficient, and only activates part of the structure, getting it into a weird state. You usually want to avoid this.

So, those are the main concepts:

  • Energy activates structure.
  • There’s no inherent meaning, it’s just a matter of which signatures correspond to which structures, and which structures influence which cells.
  • Signature scale, and using it to work with different domains.

I’m going to think about metaphors today, and write about that tomorrow. Any thoughts? Leave a comment.

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

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Posted in Fundamentals of Conscious Magick | 10 Comments »

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