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Of everything I’ve taught myself, magick is the most complicated. It takes a deep understanding that’s hard to fake. You can’t watch a video or get an example online.
Learning magick is a skill. There’s no one recipe to exploring how reality interacts with your thoughts. It takes experience to learn how to learn magick.
This week is about improving your skill of learning magick. I’ll have specific things for beginners, energy healers, psychics and ritual mages to learn, too. It’ll probably take more than a week to cover everything.
Today: Goals, paths and detours.
Good Long-Term Goals
Good goals create paths. Paths give you the context to measure your progress. Without a goal and a path, it’s hard to inspire yourself with small victories.
Paths should be short enough to manage in your head. You need to intuitively understand your path to gauge your progress.
Close goals create good paths. Your current abilities plus a little more. The path should be obvious and easy to revise.
“Obvious and easy to revise” will change as you get more experience making paths. A few weeks to a few months feels good for me.
Concrete goals also create good paths. Don’t try to “be more lucky”. Try to “make money with roulette,” or “get a warning when I’m about to say the wrong thing.” Concrete goals create specific, unique paths.
If you have vague goals, daydream. See what you’ll do with the ability. Those specific actions are your real goals.
Take Detours Often
No one person can make a cup of coffee. It takes bean growers and roasters, someone to make a stove and coffee pot, a potter to make a mug, and so on.
Magick is much more complicated than coffee, and we don’t have the means to specialize. You have to understand everything.
Understanding everything requires detours.
You still need goals and paths. Those drive you forward. But your first path will never take you to your goal. The real skill of paths is knowing when to abandon them.
Recently, I was learning communication. I had the basic technique, and I had the right magickal structures set up, but it just wasn’t working. I’d also had “Learn to use smaller signatures” on my list for a while. It took me a few weeks to try it, but using smaller signatures was the key. It let me pull thoughts from my brain precisely enough for someone else to read them.
Before that, a few mages were able to locate me much more easily than I wanted. I improved every shield I knew, but it didn’t work. Then a friend taught me more about physical effects, and me how to use the connections for physical effects to access a person shielding. My shielding worked once I also protected those physical effect connections.
As you explore, some things won’t make sense. Trust that. Pause the big goal, spend a day exploring the question. Sometimes the new understanding will create a new path.
It takes experience to recognize good detours. I’m not an expert yet. I don’t know anyone that is. But it’s a valuable skill. And the only way to get better is to practice.
Other posts in this series:- Learning Magick: Goals, Paths and Detours (April 12, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Feedback and Honesty (April 13, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Focus on Technique (April 15, 2010)
- Learning Magick: Freedom to Play (April 16, 2010)
Tags: Learning, Quick Tips