Posts Tagged ‘Spirits’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Many Faces of Spirits

Wednesday, June 4th, 2014

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

Readers sometimes ask, “What do spirits think about X?” Morality, war, death, stuff like that.

It reminds me of friends asking, “What do women want?” As though all 3.5 billion women got together and agreed on it.

The answer is the same: Like all people, they think and want different things. What matters more is the spirits / women you want to spend time with, and what they think about those things. So ask them.

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

Tags:
Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

Studying a Science

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014

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

I studied science in school. Chemistry, physics, a little geology, a lot of algorithms. Did labs and programming assignments, even published some original research.

You know what I didn’t do? Mix random chemicals and try to reinvent chemistry.

I view spirits as professors. They already know much of how magick works. When they don’t, they help me figure it out. They give me techniques to practice (homework). And we have labs, where I test a technique, verify I’m getting the results they promised, and at the same time, see for myself that their predictions were accurate.

I want to share magick with the world. I want to publish original research. But like school, first I’m going to learn what we already know.

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

Tags: ,
Posted in Learning Magick | 4 Comments »

Materialist Magick

Wednesday, April 30th, 2014

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

Like most scientists, I’m a materialist. That means I believe everything can be broken down into smaller parts, and that thought and consciousness are the result of nerves firing.

Simon asks:

I think its interesting that you’ve recently come out and explicitly called yourself a ‘materialist’. I wonder if you could expand on your take on this a bit more. You must be one of the very few people writing who call themselves a materialist who also engages in spirit communication! Do you consider spirits are physical matter -just of an unfamiliar kind?

Let’s start with what materialism is, then discuss how we get to spirits and magick.

Materialism

From wikipedia: In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that all things are composed of material, and that all emergent phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material properties and interactions. In other words, the theory claims that our reality consists entirely of physical matter that is the sole cause of every possible occurrence, including human thought, feeling, and action.

This is roughly what I mean. Consciousness and though are not things unto themselves, but rather emerge from the firing of nerves, hormones, and other physical matter.

Keep in mind, no serious thinker limits “physical matter” to “things we can touch.” We all believe in magnetism, gravity, and dark matter. There are many types of physical matter, and some of them interact in ways that are unintuitive to out brains, which evolved to understand how to throw stones, rather than how dark matter works. To me, magickal structures are just unusual physical substances that, like dark matter, interact in unusual ways.

But the important part is, all physical matter can be broken down into smaller parts. The brain is made of nerves, which are made of molecules, then atoms, and so on. The complex behaviors emerge from a great many simple interactions, similar to how complex computer programs emerge from the simple interactions of many transistors. And we can understand how the complex thing works by understanding how all the parts work, and how they interact. Then we can improve it.

(That’s part of why materialism is so common among scientists.)

Good series on materialism, I agree with most of it: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_(sequence) (Scroll down to “Main Sequence”)

Spirits

But what about spirits? Aren’t those free-floating minds?

Well, they’re minds made up of magickal structures. Kind of like artificial intelligence is a mind made of transistors. Assemble connections, energy, and similar magickal structures in the right way, and you get a conscious mind.

(Same goes for ethereal software.)

And, just like some AI researchers want to upload our minds into computers, I could see us uploading our minds into magickal structures to become spirits some day.

What About Thoughtforms?

I don’t talk about thoughtforms, but people I respect do. What’s up?

When I say “thought,” I mean the standard definition: Ideas in your brain. It’s not an external object, but rather the subjective experience of nerves firing.

But many systems of magick describe thought as an external thing, as something that can go out, cause change, and become solid (“thoughtform” or “egregore”). Are they wrong?

I think we’re both describing some of the same external phenomena, using different explanations. Egregore and ethereal software both point to the same external force, and when you “send out your thought,” I’d say you’re sending a message to some ethereal software. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that we’re explaining the same phenomena in different ways.

So why not just use the standard terms? Because saying, “I’m sending out my thought” sounds so simple, it becomes easy to skip over a lot of really important steps. I want us to explore those steps, because understanding them lets us understand magick, which lets us do it better and build it into a science.

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Fundamentals of Conscious Magick | 12 Comments »

First Success: Sensations in a Non-Mage (My Work April 19-25)

Friday, April 25th, 2014

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

Mages feel energy, but non-mages don’t. Understanding the cause should lead to insights in how energy interacts with nerves and the brain, and ultimately lead to better healing techniques. So I’m working on a technique to produce sensations in non-mages.

This week, I  the start of that technique. But first, I need to back up, and share some work I’ve left out of other “My Work This Week” reports.

A few weeks ago, I asked the spirits I work with for an expert in humans, then asked him, “Tell me about aura and using it to create sensations.”

He didn’t have an answer for sensations. But I got some good background information, plus one valuable insight:

  • If you place healing energy in someone’s energy layer, the healing result is weak. If you follow the paths from energy to cells, and place the healing energy closer to cells, the healing result is stronger. Imagine it like massaging someone through a winter coat vs massaging their skin. Closer to cells = Larger effect.
  • With sensations, the opposite is true: Energy placed in the aura produces sensations, but energy close to cells does not. It’s like the massage doesn’t work if you’re touching their skin. I’d noticed this too, and just said, “Huh, sensations are different.”
  • Insight: The spirit pointed out, the only reason this would happen is if energy in the aura went to more than one place.

At this point, the coat analogy breaks down, and I just have to explain the details. If the energy your the aura only goes to the nerves in your body, as I believed it did, then getting closer to nerves would produce a larger effect. But if there are two sets of paths going from your aura to your body, then going closer to nerves means you affect nerves more, but you miss the other path. If the other path is important, then missing it would cause the person to not feel sensations. Which is exactly what happens.

Using techniques for sensory connections, I found the other paths. They go to the brain. So, if you place energy in the aura of someone’s arm, that energy goes both to their arm, and to their brain.

(Like many steps in this project, the sensory techniques to find those paths could be a whole series.)

We did some testing. We created a sensation, then blocked the paths from my aura to my brain. The sensation stopped. We un-blocked the paths, and the sensation started again. Clearly, the path to the brain is what matters for sensations.

We looked at these paths in non-mages. They were atrophied, with gaps along the way. Think of a chain of dominoes, stood up and ready to topple, except some of them are missing or spaced too far apart. Is that the reason non-mages don’t feel sensations? No way to know. But it’s certainly sufficient.

How do we produce sensations given these problems? The spirit suggested a technique: Warm up those pathways from aura to brain by sending them energy directly. We place a little energy in their aura, follow where it goes, and place additional energy there. Follow that new energy, place additional energy wherever it goes, and repeat, all the way down to brain. Think of this like filling in the gaps between dominoes.

Once those paths are warmed up, we can send energy to the person’s aura, just like we do with mages. Since the connections are already full of energy, any additional energy will flow right through them, into the person’s brain. Hopefully, this will produce sensations.

(Why bother with aura at all? Why not just produce the sensations by overwhelming the pathways close to their brain? Because getting these paths to a basic level of energy is simple, but activating the sensation is complex. It’s important that the sensation follows the right paths. Placing energy in the aura does this automatically. If we went closer to brain, we’d have to figure out which paths to affect.)

We tested this with the same friend from last week who didn’t feel energy. First, as a control, we tested without this technique. She again didn’t feel energy.

Then we charged up the paths from her aura to her brain, put energy in her aura, and she felt an itch in her forehead. We blocked the paths, and the itch reduced. I made a point of asking a generic, “What do you feel now?” to keep from suggesting experiences to her.

When we unblocked those paths, and before I even asked what she felt, she said that the itch had returned. I asked the spirit, “Do it again,” meaning to block the sensation again. He misunderstood, and repeated the whole sensation technique, which intensified the itch to unpleasant levels. I asked him to shut it down, and the itching stopped. It would be nicer if each sensation had matched my command, but on the whole, I’ll call that a successful first run.

I’m pretty excited. Before, we had a list of skills that ought to lead to a technique. Now, we have a technique. I still want to test it with more people, learn to do the technique myself (without the spirit), and refine the type of energy we use — I want to create more than just itchy foreheads, after all. But this is a big step toward that solution.

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

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | No Comments »

Seeing Spirits

Wednesday, March 26th, 2014

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

How can I see spirits?

I’ve gotten that question more than once. I understand why: If you can see it, you know it’s real, and you know you’re doing it right. Mages often talk about seeing spirits they summon. Plus it looks so easy on TV.

Here’s the thing: Spirits, connections, magickal energy, and all these other ethereal structures don’t interact with light. There’s nothing to see.

That’s true of a lot of things, actually. You can’t see magnetism. Gravitons deflect light, but you can’t see them, either. And dark matter got its name because it doesn’t interact with light. All real, all invisible.

But what about people who summon a spirit and see an angel?

They’re seeing a vision, an image transmitted from the spirit’s mind to theirs. And either their brain is projecting the vision on top of reality, like a mirage, or they’re being a bit liberal with their words, choosing to say they saw a spirit rather than had a vision of a spirit.

Either way, the spirit isn’t interacting with light. It’s interacting with the mage’s brain, something spirits do all the time when they communicate with us.

What if you want that experience? Tell the spirit you’d like a vision. Ask it to show you what it looks like, or something representative of it. Don’t just assume all spirits will do that automatically — in my experience, most don’t.

Will it work? I expect some spirits are better at sending visions than others, and some people are better at receiving them. But if that’s important to you, ask the spirits you know to introduce you to someone who can do that. Then leave a comment letting us know what happened.

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

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Finding a (Spirit) Mentor

Wednesday, March 12th, 2014

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

Domenick asks:

How does one find a magick mentor?

Common answers: Join an order, like the Golden Dawn or OTO. Take classes at an occult bookstore or online. Go to local pagan events, volunteer, meet people. All solid answers.

But the real answer is: Be interesting enough to attract a mentor.

Organizations want bodies. Volunteer or pay, and you’re interesting.

I’ve never joined magick organizations, though. It’s not that I didn’t want a mentor, it’s just that all the resources I could find were about rituals, religion, or visualization — things you focus on while your unconscious does the magick. But I wanted to understand how my unconscious mind did magick, so rituals and religion and visualizations were all distractions.

My mentors have always been spirits. But they don’t want money, and they don’t need members, so how do you become interesting to them?

I pondered magick on my own for a while. A decade, maybe more. I wasn’t thinking about becoming interesting enough to meet spirits, I was just curious, and it gave me something to do when school was dull.

Spirits started wanting to work with me once I learned to awaken ethereal muscles. At first, it was strictly charity — I’d learned enough to suggest that I could learn more with help, so they stepped up. And as I learned more, more spirits wanted to collaborate, to figure out techniques together, trade training, or just learn watch me do the technique to see how humans are different.

Last year, I learned to communicate the way spirits do. Rather than having the spirit connect to my brain, I would package my thoughts, send them to the spirit, then read the packaged thoughts they sent. And spirits opened up, answering my questions much more directly, treating me as a peer. I think it’s like learning a foreign language: Even if everyone you meet in France can speak English, the fact that you bothered learning French makes them respond differently.

Summary: To find a mentor, learn magick, become interesting, and talk with friendly spirits you meet.

(Also, learn protection — you’ll also become interesting to less-friendly spirits. But you were going to learn that anyway, right?)

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Learning Magick | 2 Comments »

How I Chose My Spirits

Monday, December 23rd, 2013

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

Yvonne asks:

[The spirits you work with,] how do you know they are experts in what they do? And how do you know if they are evolved or enlightened beings whose interests are fully beneficent?

Let’s forget for a moment these are spirits. Let’s treat them like people, working in a field with no licensing or standards body. Which is really most of the business world.

For example, I do computer consulting. How do my clients know I’m an expert? They talk to me, my other clients, and other people in the field. And, while that’s not 100% certain knowledge, it’s good enough to let us work together.

Same with spirits: I trust them because I’ve worked with them, or because spirits I know vouch for them. When I call a spirit an expert at communication, or healing, or something else, it’s because a spirit I know vouches for them. The spirits I work with organize into groups or communities, and when that community has consistently steered me true in training and introductions, I trust them to decide who’s an expert.

Don’t have a community of spirits yet? There’s no simple recipe, just like there’s no recipe for making friends or finding business partners, but a few things to look for:

  • Can they communicate well?
  • Do their connections feel precise?
  • When they teach you a technique, does the technique work?

In other words, much the same thing you’d look for in a teacher, consultant, or anyone else you might work with.

What about “fully beneficent?” Well, I’ve worked with spirits in this community for years, and they seem like good folks. Helpful, never drained or otherwise harmed me, concerned with my growth as a person (see consciousness integration). I trust them for the same reasons I trust my friends.

I think that’s all we can ask for. I don’t even know how we’d tell if something is fully beneficent, or just 99% beneficent, or just good most of the time. I don’t know what we can observe that would let us tell the difference. It’s like calling something omnipotent after seeing it turn some people into pillars of salt — yes, that seems quite potent, but omnipotent? I don’t think that’s a sufficient test. Claims like that seem like wishful thinking or bragging on the part of the priests, rather than a real claim a person could make about a spirit, or a claim a spirit could credibly make about themselves. But claims like that have become popular in our culture, so I can see why Yvonne would ask about it.

Summary: Treat spirits like people. Work with them, decide who to trust, and accept that you can’t ever know 100%.

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

Tags:
Posted in Fundamentals of Conscious Magick | 4 Comments »

When Communication is Exhausting

Friday, December 20th, 2013

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

Today’s post is for people who work with spirits a lot.

You know how most spirits are easy to talk to, but sometimes, a particularly advanced spirit sends concepts that just make your brain exhausted? Their concept refuses to transform into a thought or word in your mind, and the harder you focus on it, the more exhausted you become.

It feels like reading a graduate textbook, where the author keeps using specialized words you have to look up. Have you experienced this?

I’ve been running into it more and more, as I meet more advanced spirits. It happens when I’m training in a new topic with an expert. They have concepts I’m not ready for, concepts that take too many steps to think. It’s like if you want to explain how a virus works, but the person doesn’t know any biology. You’d need to start with DNA and cells and so on before you can get into viruses. If you just say, “A virus deposits DNA into living cells,” without explaining DNA or cell, the person might nod, but they won’t grasp any meaning. That’s what it’s like communicating with these advanced spirits: One complex concept might be an entire sentence, and my mind doesn’t know what half the words mean.

I’ve noticed that this doesn’t always happen. Spirits who specialize in communication don’t seem to have this problem. They can say the equivalent of, “A virus deposits DNA,” and the concept of DNA is so clear, I can grasp it as I’m thinking about the larger sentence. But most spirits can’t do that.

My normal solution is to recognize when this happens, and stop trying to read the concept. Seriously, just put it down or you’ll exhaust yourself. Instead, ask them to step you through the concept more slowly. They’re always happy to, and often devote an entire training session (10-15 minutes) to it.

(Another solution is to learn to place the message into your mind like those communication experts do. I’m working on that now, and it’s not easy.)

But there’s good news: If a spirit sends concepts that are too complex for you to read, it means they have something new and interesting to say. And the hard part of training is finding the spirit, which you’ve already done. So, just ask them to slow down, break the training up into multiple sessions, and enjoy learning something new.

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

4 Questions on Demons

Monday, October 7th, 2013

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

Responding to Don’t Mock Demons, Ola Olu asks four questions. I’ll answer each in turn.

Protecting Siblings

Q: if i can call an angel from mars to protect a family member with ritual magick, how would you protect your siblings from demon that seek revenge on you though could not get through you?

Ah, the basic question: How do I stop malicious spirit X from doing undesirable thing Y?

Some systems of magick have many answers. For this spirit, invoke this angel. For that spirit, use this ritual. Different ways of handling each spirit.

But I like answers based on basic principles. So, let’s go basic: The malicious spirit needs ethereal muscles to do magick. If you disable his ethereal muscles, the spirit can’t do magick anymore. Then you win.

(How do you do that? Disable the connections between its ethereal muscles and the rest of its mind. For more, follow that link, which is from when I used the term mental muscles instead of my current ethereal muscles .)

So, my answer to you is: I would ignore the angel, connect to the malicious spirit, disable its mind, win, and then eat some pizza. Because pizza is awesome.

(Your magick will still work without the pizza, though.)

Banishing Ashtaroth

Q: i was once troubled by a DEMON and later i called archangel MICHAEL to banish it from my room. I want to know how to banish ASHTAROTH without the aid of holy GOD and the service of strong ANGELS.

Connect to whatever you want to get rid of. Damage the connections between its ethereal muscles and the rest of its mind. Then, pizza.

Although I should note, in my experience, these impressively-named entities are often ethereal software, used by a variety of spirits. So, if one of those spirits is bothering you, the answer is:

Trace the connections back to the ethereal software. Hack it. Remove that spirit’s privelages with the software. If the spirit continues bothering you, see above.

(That link is from even longer ago, when I used the term system for what I now call ethereal software.)

Circles of Protection

Q: Can you create a sacred circle of protection with this new system of magick and you are sure of 100% safty from the venom of BAAL, LILITH, MOLOCH just to name a few.

100% safety? Does not exist. Any shield can be bypassed. The point of shields in serious fights is to delay an attacker, not to stop them. The only way to win is through offense.

Stealing Souls

Q: Direct magick would fuel its energy from the soul, and these demons have their tricks to buying even the souls of humans. I would wait to see direct magick do better than the ritual of solomonic magick.

I think this is a terms problem:

Direct magick clearly draws its power from somewhere inside the mage. And we can call that a soul, or a source, or a giant pizza, because, well, we can point to a thing and assign it a name, that’s how names work.

And the whole definition of demon is that there’s this thing humans have called a soul, which isn’t a physical thing we can photograph or measure or anything, but that demons can steal it.

So, if you pick a spirit and choose to call it a “demon,” and you point to the source of a magick inside a mage and choose to call it a “soul,” it becomes natural to ask, “Can the demon steal your soul, and thereby steal your magick?”

But there’s no reason to think that calling a spirit a demon actually gives it the power to steal your anything, and there’s no reason to think that the thing demonologists call a soul corresponds to the thing we chose to call a soul. After all, we just kind of picked a word for that source of power. Let’s try picking a different term:

Can that malicious spirit steal a mage’s giant pizza?

Honestly, I have no idea. But I doubt it. First, spirits don’t like pizza — never had my leftovers stolen by Baal, after all. But second, a mage’s source of power is heavily integrated into their ethereal muscles, which connect to their brain. So a power source not the kind of thing you “steal.” And what would that even mean? That the power source powers your ethereal muscles? That it stops powering theirs? I can’t even see what it would mean to steal a thing without a physical location.

That’s why I think this question has more to do with terms, and with assuming that the thing I call soul is the same thing another guy calls soul, and then trying to use my meaning and his meaning interchangeably.

Probably not the answers you expected, but I hope they gave you some food for thought.

My favorite food for thought is pizza.

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Ritual Magick | 3 Comments »

The 3 Questions that Guide My Training

Saturday, August 24th, 2013

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

I recently started formal training in manifesting, starting with the basics and working my way up, following the path the spirits I train with have laid out. It’s been excellent, and I’ll share some notes soon. But today, I want to talk about how I train, and the questions I’ve learned to ask over the past decade of training with various spirits, and in particular, from spirits who rarely train humans.

(Note: I’ll refer to manifesting throughout this post, but you can just replace that with whatever skill you’re learning, like energy healing or awakening ethereal muscles or anything else.)

Step 1: Ask for an expert. But not just an expert at manifesting; if you do that, you’ll get someone who knows ascended-level techniques, but has long-since forgotten the details of the simpler techniques you’ll be learning. Instead, ask for an expert at teaching the skill.

Step 2: Start at the beginning. By the time I had access to this training, I already knew a lot of magick. Energy healing, communication, awakening mental muscles, and so on. It’s tempting to ask, “What’s next, what do I learn when I can already do all this?” And I did, and it lead me to focus on the wrong parts of communication for months.

Instead, ask, “What’s the simplest version of this skill?” The spirits I work with have a levels system worked out, so I ask for level 1. I verify I’m doing level 1 correctly, then proceed to level 2.

When I did this with communication, I found I wasn’t placing signatures into my brain properly (part of level 2), even though I’d already learned most of levels 3 and 4. Fixing that fixed a lot of problems I’d been having.

Step 3: Ask what other domains should be involved. For example, level 2 communication is about placing the message into your brain, so in addition to the ethereal muscles for communication, you also want to use the ethereal muscles for physical effects (specifically nerve effects). To properly learn level 2 communication, I first trained in the fundamental skills for physical effects, then in nerve effects. That got those ethereal muscles awake and engaged. Then I was able to use those muscles for communication as well.

Once again, I didn’t know that when I started learning communication, and once again, wasted weeks and months trying to learn the techniques using the wrong ethereal muscles. But this time, I know to ask, so I’ll know if there’s some other skill I should learn first.

Summary

Those are my three questions: “What does level 1 manifesting look like? What other domains should I learn first to do it properly? Who should I train with for those other domains?” By telling the spirit exactly what I need, I’m more likely to get it, particularly if the spirit doesn’t normally train novices in manifesting (or whatever skill you’re learning).

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

Tags: , ,
Posted in Learning Magick | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »