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I’d say people only believe what they can directly experience. No one doubts that heaters or refrigerators work, though you can’t actually see the temperature change.
The problem isn’t that magick is invisible. People believe in lots of invisible things. It’s that today’s magick is unreliable and subtle. That our threshold for success is “I can notice it if I look hard,” not “Immediate and obviously amazing results.”
The first step to earning wide acceptance of magick? Realizing that it’s our job to make obviously successful magick, not everyone else’s job to look harder.
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Okay, I’ll bite. More, more!
But if you are talking about healing magick (which is my primary interest), isn’t it also correct to say that MOST healing in and of itself is “subtle” and “unreliable?”
Not even my physician has above a 40-50% success rate when it comes to “amazing” and “immediate” results.
Are you setting a standard for magick that is higher than a medical standard when it comes to healing? (i.e., better, stronger, quicker, etc) And are you also going to argue that magick for therapeutic purposes is superior to science for the same? or are they only comparable?
Sorry for all of the rapid fire questions; as you can see I am intrigued by your writing on these matters :) Feel free to refer me to the appropriate areas of your blog.
Thank you sir
Good questions. First, some of my posts are about ideas that I haven’t entirely thought through yet, and this is one of them. So I’m figuring this out as I reply to your questions, and my answers may change.
On healing: To cure a disease is unreliable and requires proper studies. Therefore, I would say that it’s a bad first demonstration of magick, whether we’re talking a new healing client or a published scientific study. Which is actually something I hadn’t realized before.
Numbing is instant and, if powerful enough, obvious. No one doubts that morphine works. In the healing world, numbing would make a better initial demonstration than curing.
Side story: I had kidney stones last year. Terribly painful. One evening, I used healing on the cramping, which helped manage the pain, but over a few hours it rose from a 2/10 to a 4/10, and I took some painkillers. (Percocet? Something like that.) The drug took 20 minutes to kick in, but within 5 minutes, it messed up my mental posture and deactivated my healing, and my pain shot to an 8/10. When something like that is so fast and dramatic, it makes the magick really obvious.
I wouldn’t expect magick better than medicine in the realms medicine is good at. I expect magick to eventually exceed traditional medicine in some realms, though, such as nerve damage. And I’d expect the best healing outcomes to come from a combination of magick and drugs and surgery, all doing what each is best at and helping where the others are weak.
If you’d like more, here’s a post on the intersection of magick and medicine: https://magickofthought.com/2012/02/magick-needs-modern-medicine/
And no need to apologize. It’s great talking these ideas through with you.