"Steal This Book of Shadows"

"Steal This Book of Shadows" ver 2.0
(What's Really Happening in the Mind of a Wizard)
An Occult Tutorial
by Azzerac
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Page 28
Mind Reading #2
The Mental Landscape

(Brought To You By,...)

I've been studying human psychology for 3/4ths of my life, and to say that "one can ever truly know another" is a joke, at best. It get's even worse when you're actually being someone else. Imagine, for a moment, the actual structure of the brain. It's two hemispheres, each divided into Three to Four layers, developed, one after another, as evolution required. Wrap them around a third brain, the brain stem, and then connect the sides with a network only capable of sustaining a maximum of 7-fold reasoning, comparing 8 concepts simultaneously.

Think of it as a three-story building, with an occupant & their servant, who probably never leaves. There's a bridge across the two, on the second story. They have an idiot child that lives in the basement (the brain stem/spinal chord). and no one ever visits, so they never clean. Now, imagine trying to find which room, on which floor, in which building, that the occupant resides, from the outside. Guess if they're even conscious, healthy or ill, let alone their likes, dislikes, or hobbies, simply by looking at the outside. Lights going on and off are a good indicator, but no real information is given, save for room currently occupied. Now give them the ability to travel about at the speed of light.

The above is just an analogy concerning trying to read the brain from the outside. An EEG (Electroencephalograph) is a wonderful device, and CAT-Scans, PET-Scans, and MRI's are even better, but it's still "looking at the building from the outside". Take the 'building' apart, and the occupant dies. The building is the brain. The Occupant is the "Consciousness". The Servant is the "Mind". Each of these is a structure, with it's own landscape, patterns, and personality.

Q-Mech (Quantum Mechanics) is as close as a model for electrical behavior in the brain, as it is a model for the electrons motions & location in an atom. The pathways of energy, like Schrödinger's Cat, are still enclosed. The vocalizations, body language, and other subtler signs, can tell us limited conditions of the 'occupants' status, but not all there is to them. The rest is left to assumption & association. These two devices are techniques we use to draw an intuitive 'Venn Diagrams' around preconceived personality attributes that we see in each other, so that we can relate to them. In accord with The Schrödinger Effect, these are asserted upon the other person's (occupant's) neural network.

To read the pattern, with as little interference & impact on those patterns as possible, we have to understand the essence of 'pattern recognition'. Here's a Sub-Exercise. It's the best thing I can suggest, if you lack development of this concept, on an intuitive level.

Sub-Exercise A): "Mall-Crawl"

        Go to a local, indoor mall or shopping center.
        Have a seat: Not at the food court, but a serious thoroughfare with a lot of traffic.
        Look at the people.

Now, stop looking at each person, but look at all of the people in front of you, at once. Take on the 1000-Meter-Stare, and incorporate peripheral vision, as well. Don't focus on "Location", but "Momentum". See how they move relative to one another. Each of them is usually navigating by acknowledging the location & movements of one or two others, but you can reflect upon the mass as a whole, and see how the crowd flows like water over rocks. People moving in eddies and swirls, as they move to avoid one another, clash, acknowledge, and move on.

If you're lucky, you can find one or two that seem to be moving independently of the mass. They seem to be able to move at their own pace, never touching another, but ducking, weaving, passing through the mass unhindered & unbidden by the rest of the crowd. These are the people who navigate the crowds in just this fashion, using pattern (Not Object) recognition. They may even have an entourage that is stumbling to keep up, and fails to grasp how this person can move so freely in a "Christmas Shopping Crowd".

It's probably Me. ~Wink!~

Exercise of The Day: "Personality Pattern Recognition"

Do the "Ping" Exercise, but stay in a "Non-Mind", Zen state. Your subject is all that exists.

Employ the very areas of your mind that you used for "Sub-Exercise A", but employ as many senses as possible in the perception of the topic, through this pattern recognition. (My strengths are "Tactile" & "Visual", in this mode. I "See" & "Touch" the changes, but the sensation is a full body experience with me).

To "Read" the mind, employ as many as possible, but allow your strongest, "Base-Line" sense to take the lead.

Stay in a passive, non-assertive state, and allow the information to come to you.

Now, this is where it gets weird!

No one thinks like you, at all! Differing Hierarchies of Information, Mood, Think-vs.-Feel, Fight-vs.-Flight, Passive-vs.-Aggressive, Like-vs.-Dislike, and more separate you from them. Different people think at different speeds. Some think at Speed of Speech, while others Intuit Emotionally as their core mode of decision-making.

What makes it harder is that the mechanisms that you use to interpret, direct, & control information through you physical senses are "out-of-the-loop" when performing through you Temporal Lobes. No Hypothalamus, no Amygdala, no previous logic structure is in place to correlate the data coming in, and new connections have to be made.

So, the problem is now two-fold: Not only is the terrain alien, but your own ability to qualify, quantify, & correlate the information is fragmented, undirected, brand-new, and indiscernible from your own thoughts & feelings.

You must, now, work on your Receptive State/Zen State of consciousness, and thereby be able to know that all that is coming in to your mind is from the Subject, and not your own musings. I emphasize a passive, "Watching Television" Alpha-State, as opposed to active, aggressive, "Playing a First-Person Shooter" concentrative state.

Practice! Practice!! PRACTICE!!!