A Sense of Magick
by Rhea Shemazi and Raven Erling
Magick is as natural as breathing. It is something we are born knowing, but many of us are trained out of that knowledge in the process of growing up and becoming socialized. All children come equipped with a sense of wonder, an ability to learn, and a desire for information. One of the first things we learn is to use our senses to explore the world. We learn that there are expected ways of interpreting the information from our senses, and that there are five senses that we categorize. When we are learning Magick, we revisit our senses, and learn to interpret the data we usually ignore. Our worldview shifts to one where Magick is taken for granted.
The Sense of Touch
Our kinesthetic sense is not limited to physical touch. It extends from the physical through to the extra-physical, and includes a sense of the touch and feeling of different energies. Just like a child, who knows what it feels like to walk into a room where an argument has taken place, we reactivate that awareness of residual energies. In a highly developed state, this can lead to an ability to psychometrize, to read the energies from physical objects we touch with our hands, or hold against our skin (forehead, inner arm, throat, or some other part of our body that is more sensitive to extra-physical energy).
Our kinesthetic sense also extends to the skill for finding things that are not physically present. We reach out with phantom limbs to touch things that are distant to us in time and space, to feel texture, heat and cold, judge weight and inertia. If we are also able to move objects that we are not physically in touch with, this is called telekinesis (kinesis from the kinesthetic sense). There is thought that the act of perception makes a connection between an object and ourselves and that distance then becomes an illusion.
The Sense of Smell
Our sense of smell is little understood by researchers. We do know that it acts directly on the limbic part of the brain, the primal instincts, and may be how we recognize family. Certainly, it is a direct route to our emotions, and bypasses conscious thought in most cases. Smells summon memory, reminding us of times long gone, and alerting us to danger. A fear smell in a crowd instantly spreads, turning it into a mob. Coupled with our sense of hearing, it might be called a primal survival sense.
The Aromancy Guild (Australia and America) explores the deliberate use of aroma for ritual purposes. Incenses, essential oils, wood resins and pheromones are combined to heighten and change perception, enriching and enhancing experiences.
It is good to be conscious of the way smell affects you, and to identify the classes of aroma that make you feel most balanced and aware.
The Sense of Taste
We taste a variety of substances, among them salt, sweet, savory and bitter. Taste deteriorates over time, which is why older people tolerate spicy food better. Smoking also changes the sense of taste, as does any pervading smell. We can extend our sense of taste to energy, experiencing different kinds of energy like different kinds of food. While it is a rare skill, it is a useful one.
The Sense of Hearing
Sound vibrates our whole body. Chanting, pure ringing tones, the sounds of water, wind and life are all around us. We learn the skill of selective inattention as we mature, shutting down our awareness of the cacophony of unpleasant sounds that make up our environment. Very few places are actually quiet, so we need to work at it to balance the sounds, and mask them with sounds that are more pleasing to us.
Hearing needs to be relearned if you are to be a mage. You will need to be consciously aware of the sounds around you, and make a new conscious balance. By re-activating your sense of hearing, it is possible to have extrasensory hearing, up to and including distant hearing without a radio. Exquisite hearing is best practiced away from electronic “white noise” and out of the city.
The Sense of Sight
In the West, our sense of sight is the sense we use most often. We are so sure we know how it works that I’ve heard people tell me that they cannot “visualize” (a technique for holding an image in the mind). All sight is visualization. All we actually perceive are wavelengths of light that hit the back of the retina. We translate these patterns of light into recognizable pictures, all unconsciously.
Trained artists are aware that each of them sees color differently. We mix colors from a limited palette, and then combine them to make 256 basic colors. Many discover that their range is limited to fewer colors, while some few find that they can identify all these hues plus their tints (adding white) and shades (adding black). In printing, we either use pre-mixed inks, or use a four-color process that uses CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) on white paper. For the Internet, we use RGB (red, green, blue), and that gives a different quality to the image.
Most people will feel comfortable interpreting colors as reddish, greenish or bluish, and some will add brownish. These are the colors of the earth, sea and sky, the colors of the forest and rivers, colors that reflect and refract.
The physical sense of sight can be easily extended. Often called “the sight” or second sight, this refers to deliberately seeing things that others around you are not aware of. It might be tracers of light, shadows, colors of an aura, or seeing into the realm of phantasm. This is called clairvoyance, though it might as easily be called far-vision.
Vision is also a phenomenon of conscious dreaming, and is shared by artists and visionaries, mages and dreamers alike.
Making Connections
In various ways, we seek to use our enlarged and numerous senses, to become more connected with the world of spirit, as well as the world of form. Natural mages are joined to the world, creatively interacting with the enlarged world of perception, and celebrating the world of the senses.
We find connections in nature by watching the seasons unfold, seeing significance in the flight of clouds across the sky, the play of light and shadow, and the movement of the wind and stars. To the mage, all things are important, and none more so that knowing and recognizing their own place in the natural world. Begin your journey into Magick by exploring your senses, and by following the message of the Oracle of Delphi: “Know Yourself.”
Know Yourself: Being Real
Raven’s rule of magick states that Magick comes from two sources: inside the body and outside the body. The corollary is that if you cannot work with the energy and the magick within your body, then you will not be able to tap into an outside source of magick or energy. In the words of the Charge of the Goddess:
… If that which you seek you find not within you,
You will never find it without you;
For behold, I have been with you from the beginning
And I am that which is attained at the end of desire.
As you progress in your magical explorations and over time, your definitions of Self and Other may change. For the purposes of this chapter, we are referring to magicks of the Self as those energies generated within your own energy field. Our primary focus is on energy created through breathing, manipulating inner energies, harnessing sound, visualization and movement. Later, we extend that energy by using tools and making connections with outside forces and powers.
The first things we concentrate on are ways of working with the energy of your body, of knowing where the boundaries are between the Self and what is outside the Self.
In working with our bodies, first we take a really good look at ourselves. Who are we? What color is our hair, eyes, skin. What is our ethnic background? How does that inform our ideas about who we are in the world? If you are a Caucasian person living in America, England, Europe or Australia, you will have certain assumptions about how your body should look. Society will have values related to whether you are male or female, what your body weight should be, how you ought to dress for your place/job in society, what kind of friendships and romantic and sexual relationships you should have, and what your leisure activities are allowed to be.
There will be a list of assumptions about what kind of chemicals it is all right to use – alkaloids such as coffee or chocolate, tea, sugar, salt, preservatives, flavor enhancers and colorings, alcohol, tobacco, prescribed drugs of various types, over-the-counter prescriptions like aspirin, cough and cold medicine, things to help you go to sleep and to stay awake, and so on. There will also be a whole list of things it is not all right to use, mostly herbs and their refined derivatives. The kind of work you do, where you live, the kind of house you live in, the car you drive and where your children (if any) go to school will also be part of your personal identification.
However, if you were a Caucasian living in Japan, China or the Middle East, those cultural markers would all be different from the people around you. Likewise if you are Chinese and living in America, Japanese and living in Africa, Martian and living in Afghanistan, all these are factors you must take into account. No one lives in a vacuum and in beginning any new endeavor, it is important to realize not only who you are, but who other people think you are, or expect you to be.
Biases
Who do you think you are? Start by answering a few of these basic questions, and explore your biases and cultural assumptions.
1. What country are you from?
2. What is your ethnicity? Include parents and grandparents too.
3. What is your coloring?
4. How acute are your senses? Hearing? Touch? Taste? Smell? Vision?
5. How important is education to you? Why?
6. Do you notice your environment? Are the weather patterns around you the same as those where you grew up? What does the difference, or similarity, tell you about the world?
7. What is your personal ethical code? Is it okay to lie? Under what circumstances? Is it okay to kill? To maim? To defend yourself? To take revenge? Is it okay to run away? Is it important to keep your word? Is it important to do the things you say you will do? Do you make promises? If so, do you keep them? Are you a good friend? Are you good at relationships? How good are your communication skills? Can you debate? Can you think clearly? Are you passionate about things? Do you have a temper? If so, is it under your control? Do you love easily? Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Do you feel your actions have an impact on the world? Why? Will you stand up for yourself? Will you defend principles? Do you know what principles are? What are the personal things you are willing to live for? Are you a deist (belief in deity – one or many)?
8. Have you ever learned a meditation discipline? For how long?
9. Have you ever learned a martial art? Which one? What did it teach you about yourself?
10. Are you a dancer? What kind?
11. Have you done any kind of movement work? Any kind of body work that teaches you about balance, center, orienting yourself in space?
12. Are manners important to you?
13. Do you learn easily?
14. What is your learning mode? How do you learn? By listening? By writing things down? By reading about things and then trying them? By watching someone do something and learning from modeling their behavior? By having someone talk you through a skill? By reciting things out loud and hearing them? Do you learn from a combination of these things? Which combination best suits your learning patterns?
15. What are your goals for the next year of your life? What are your goals for the next five years?
16. What talents do you possess? Include everything, including all life skills – shopping, cleaning, cooking – plus creative talents. Can you draw? Can you dance? Can you balance a checkbook?
17. Do you consider yourself to be psychic? In what way? How does that work for you?
18. Have you ever had an “out of body” experience?
19. Have you ever known who was calling you on the phone before picking up the receiver?
20. Have you ever had a mind-altering experience? What was it?
21. Are you healthy? What physical or genetic health conditions do you have, or do you expect to develop? What are you doing to minimize the change of getting those? What is your family health background?
22. What are you allergic to?
23. What are your favorite foods?
24. What are your least favorite foods?
25. Do you like yourself? Do you enjoy your own company? Do you consider yourself to be a whole person?
26. What kind of emotional relationships are you drawn to?
27. Are you monogamous? Are you serially monogamous?
28. Are you polyamorous? Do you have more than one relationship at a time?
29. How important is honesty to you in a relationship?
30. Where on the Kinsey scale would you place yourself? The far left is heterosexual and the far right is homosexual – bisexual is in the middle. Are you right of center or left of center?
31. How do you feel about sexual expression?
32. Are you a romantic person? What does that mean to you?
33. Are you good at organizing? What lets you know that?
34. Are you generally a leader or a follower?
35. Do you have an adventurous spirit?
36. Do you prefer safety and comfortable known circumstances?
This is just a start of questions you might ask yourself. Know the answers to these questions and, from time to time, answer them again to learn how the answers change.
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