Lot’s of great responses to my critique of ritual magick. Tons of trails for further exploration. One of the things I’m most fired up about is the division among people who actually practice it about what it’s really all about, and what is really an acceptable usage of it.
Haeresis says:
‘ritual magick’ isn’t really applicable to love, money, etc. There may be people who go that route, but that’s not what RM was created for.
While Rev Max offers an alternative interpretation:
seems to me that love, health, money, success etc are all perfectly legitimate things to work for
I’m getting really into the practice of being able to hold two completely contradictory principles in mind at the same time and have them be both as right or as wrong as one another. It’s like holding magnets together or something. I think if you do it long enough, the dichotomy eventually dissolves, and the argument between the two sides just drops away entirely. This is probably the best explanation I can give for why I think questioning is so important. If you ask a question, you open up to all possible answers. The pitfall of questioning, of course, is that you actually pick one of the answers. Then your whole “holding magnets together” thing falls apart. You ruin the opportunity to transcend the argument altogether.
This is why it’s so great when people disagree with me and give me good explanations of why. Keep it coming.
Oh, here’s another point raised in the comments to that post: do you have to “believe” in magic for it to work? Some say no, some say yes… What are the benefits and drawbacks of believing or disbelieving? Say you start out believing it and then something “happens”, then don’t you end up believing it anyway? So isn’t there a bit of self-deception involved? Isn’t also there some when you say you don’t need to believe it to make it work? People don’t jump out of a plane without “believing” in the efficacy of parachutes. Also, all this stuff about trying to trick or bypass your rational mind - how good of an idea is it to get into the practice of fooling yourself?
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10 Comments
getting love or money through ritual magick is no different than getting it any other way. you just develop a different set of skills to do it.
the only pitfall is, getting what you want is not neccisarily the best thing for your growth
That’s a great point actually. Just because you want something doesn’t mean that’s what you should really get. I guess that’s part of the point of genie fairy tales
the only pitfall is, getting what you want is not neccisarily the best thing for your growth
————–
You can get things that are wrong for you and it takes you months to recover.
that’s why you have to ask your spiritual guides and your ancestors what would best for you first.
nobody can make you pick what would be best for you but why would you want to pick something wrong?
I always pray for guidance before I do anything
If my spirits say no i don’t do it
i often found out why later
then again too many people are mired in short-term thinking and play now pay later sort of mindset
those people should not practice magic as they will get burned
then they come out of it and convert to fundamentalist Xianity and denounce magic as something evil
when the truth is they never were able to take responsibility for themselves in the first place
you can get guidance, you can have the ability to make changes
but the responsibility is still on you
abuse it, misuse it, do evil things
God will get pissed off that you disrespected him
and surely you will learn a valuable lesson from that too
I love the paradox. Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” in college gave me an all new respect. Now I find them yummy.
Think about belief. It’s a personal thing. You believe it –otherwise it woudn’t be a belief of yours. If you’re only trying to believe something, it’s not really a belief, more like a wish, which with the right mindset will keep itself far away from you (if you always put this idea as something in the future or “someday”–that’s exactly when it’s going to happen–never in the present).
Your world is driven by your perception of it. A very large part of your perception is put in place by your beliefs.
Look at Quantum Physics, which says that everything is really only a “possiblity” at the smallest level. What determines how you go from “possibility” to “reality”? One could say action, but what prefaces action? belief.
Belief drives your actions, and stronger belief will drive your actions further.
(and emotions drive your belief, but i won’t get into that tangent…)
But just believing in something won’t make it true if other of your beliefs don’t fit with it, or work against it. You may want to be rich and try to believe: I AM RICH in order to make yourself so, but if you hold another, deeper set belief (that you may not be aware of) that you feel you are “worthless” then your rich belief won’t go anywhere. the worthless belief is stronger in this case (as it has put you in your current situation of not being “rich” and wishing to be so)
So just believing won’t work, but I think if your beliefs are all going toward the same goal it can and does.
It’s not really “magic” or anything. it’s how we operate every day of our lives, we just are most of the time completely unaware of it.
Life is made and broken in the details. Silly little details.
my 2 cents…
(and tim thanks for the great website–i’m hooked)
Tim, again, you didn’t do a “critique of ritual magic(k).” You cherry-picked a few examples of the excesses thereof, and correctly identified some of them as equine excrement. All this proves is that you have a working shit-detector, and that you don’t always point it at what you write yourself.
Heh, Crowley was very into the idea of ‘transcending’ dichotomous ideas such as “good” and “evil” … be Because damned for a dog…
Still comes down to your Will/God’s Will… apple or garden, takes yer pick.
-tc
Huh, what is the “transcendental value or system” behind the dichotomy of human’s Will vs. God’s will, damn, sometimes I am not too stupid. Gonna have to think about this.
Ciao.
-tc
“There’s only pleasure and pain”
-Jane’s Addiction
Freeman, I’m an asshole. I admit it!
zacharius summed it up proper, above. As I posted about casting sigils to get laid, you quickly come to realise that what you want is not exactly what is best for you.
It takes some experience with meditation and dichotomies such as paradoxes and contradictions before one can seeminly become comfortable with the actual act of just existing, being able to slough off belief and adopt it willingly, to just enjoy life as a mythic journey.
If anyone must beware anything, it is belief itself.
On the note of ceremonial magic, has anyone else read Ceremonial Magic & the Power of Evocation? Dr Lisiewski makes some interesting claims and lays done some great work. I hope to begin working from it later this year:—
Seems the post ate up the link to the book, so here it is:
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1561841978/