I just had a conversation with a friend and they told they dont know how to hear spirits. Everybody thinks that you have some loud deep voice that talks to you from the depths of hell. In my experience this isnt the case. Something happened to me and I went to my godfather to tell him about it. the little voice in my head told me not to do it. But I didnt listen I did what I wanted and lost out. My Godfather knew the whole sistuation before I tole him. His spirits told him what happened. He said Jay Your dads been talking you My Guardian spirit in Palo Mayombe. He said everybody thinks you can hear this clear voice other then your own in your head thats not how they talk to you. They talk to u through your thoughts and conscience. this is when I started to turst my instincts. The spirits are there when you all them. Trust that you have the power to dring them to you we all do. Do what E.A. suggests. Take a pen and paper prepare 3 questions ahead of time. Open the sigil and ask the questions. write what ever pops in your head. I’m someone that writing to you that less then a year ago I was standing in your shoes. With anything in life it just takes practice. I love this statistic. They say to become a genius at anything takes 10,000 hours of practice. Practice and trust your instincts. YOU CAN DO IT
^ Beautiful, yeah - it’s never going to be like in the movies and I don’t mean that in a nasty snide kind of way like people think the occult is Charmed or something, but there’s a lot of lack of faith people have when they start on this path, combined with a tendency to put people who are accomplishing regular spirit communication etc. on pedestals which just makes the fact that not every early encounter is all that CGI-worthy more daunting.
And don’t ever discount early operations or early contacts/information either, when I first got into this one of the goddesses I loved the most was Hathor and she’s stayed in my life and is still there for me and opening doors, and also when I studied core shamanism, stuff from my very FIRST journey I ever did on a weekend residential training under that method is STILL both relevant and opening new understandings of stuff.
So please don’t assume that as a new beginner anything you get isn’t profound - it’s like, to the spirit world your first contact is the one where they sometimes try to tell you the most important stuff because maybe you’ll give up and stop trying, y’know?!
Trust yourself and keep records, and don’t expect everything to be too incredible at first, you’re training a whole new set of skills and it’s like drop of rain, one alone isn’t much, two, ten, twenty, then one day it just floods and the dam between you and the worlds you want to access, the dam made of all the crap society puts into your head about how you can’t do this, about how “God” sits on a cloud sending people to hell for having fun, whatever that dam is for you and your background comes CRASHING down and the river runs free.
Alot of you need to understand That E.A. Koeting is a writer and a very good one for that matter. This means that sometimes I feel he gives himself a little of poetic License. The majority of the people are here are well spoken and illteligent.That being said alot of people will write what thier experience was but the have very big vocbularies so it makes it seem more intense then it really is. Agian I’m not saying this to offend anyone. I’m just saying this so people dont get discouraged
I think a lot of this is that people are struggling to put spiritual experiences into a language that really isn’t designed to communicate those experiences. I can see your point, though, that that can make said experience sound more intense than it really was.
I’d like to agree in principle but I know so many times I’ve tried to write stuff down, and this is just for my personal diaries, stuff no-one’s going to read apart from me, and I’ve found words utterly lacking in their ability to convey the intensity… so maybe what we have is that it’s not about intensity, it’s about spectacle, and as long as people think that their first encounters or whatever are going to be spectacular with demons popping up, whirlwinds, thunder and lightning etc., well that ain’t hardly going to happen.
I think people sometimes block that internal intensity by looking for externally impressive apparitions and phenomena, but a lot of magick is like sex, the good stuff’s happening on such a deeply personal level that doesn’t always show.
There’s a problem some people, men especially, have with sex called “spectatoring” where they’re so busy observing their performance they can’t get lost in the moment… I don’t want to hammer the point home (no pun intended - well, not much :P) but that’s a thing I think people have with their magick and any spiritual experience as well.
JMO and again no offence intended. 
No, I don’t disagree. I actually see both sides in my own floundering to describe some experiences. Sometimes I’ll spend paragraph after paragraph trying to explain what was a relatively minor detail, like the way my mouth felt when the expression changed during a possession. Then at other times, I’ll note something fairly intense in a sentence or two, because, as you said, there were more interesting, if subtle things going on elsewhere. E.g., the other night during my nightly offering to Hekate, I physically felt Her hand grasp my wrist to hold me still for a moment. Well, that’s certainly a wow moment, right? But the real important stuff was what She was doing to my energetic wiring while I was being nice and still, and I wouldn’t even know how to begin to describe that.
Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with a journal when half of the experience gets left out because it’s indescribable. Probably the important half at that.
Love this revelation. Really profound for my learning.
Ohhhhhhh i see what i’ve been doing wrong.For a whole freakin year i’ve been trying to hear by blanking mind out which rarely worked to telepathically hear.I always thought it was an audible inner voice i would hear.I really needed this.