Magick of Thought

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In this series, I’m figuring out my reasons behind direct magick. You’ll get to see my thought process. If you want a polished 3-paragraph answer, come back in a week.

When something is truly, amazingly effective, it permeates our lives, and we forget it’s amazing.

Medicine reliably, routinely heals people who would otherwise die. Computers connect us to nearly every piece of human knowledge, from our living room, in our pajamas. Airplanes can put you anywhere in the world in about 24 hours.

Those are all amazing results. But we aren’t amazed by them because we expect them to work.

Magick is the opposite: We expect very little, then we’re amazed when we get any noticeable results at all. I get how hard it is to produce any noticeable results, and how much skill it takes to do that reliably, and I get how exciting it is to see your magick work and know that it’s real, because I’ve lived through all those things.

But think about it like this: A five-year-old playing the violin (without screeching) is amazing. And the New York Philharmonic is amazing. But one is amazing because of how little we expect, and the other is amazing because, well, it’s genuinely amazing.

Magick, as a field, needs to grow up. It has to move beyond “Any useful result is amazing,” and adopt the genuinely-amazing bar of every other field. That’s the only way we’re ever going to produce results on par with modern science.

I want magick so effective and reliable that it permeates our lives the way computers and medicine have. And to do that, we have to disassemble magick into its building blocks, and build something new.

• Why Direct Magick (February 4, 2012)
• Why Direct Magick: Curiosity and Results (February 5, 2012)
• Why Direct Magick: Two Kinds of Amazing (February 6, 2012)
• What Genuinely Amazing Magick Looks Like (February 7, 2012)
• The Real Reason for Direct Magick (February 12, 2012)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 9:15 AM and is filed under Personal Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.