You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
I’m on my first day of consulting in Australia, and only halfway over my jetlag. I haven’t set time aside to practice magick, and today’s post is short. Two thoughts on this:
1. Useful magick gets practiced. I’m doing plenty of manifesting, and I also did energy healing designed to prevent a cold. Neither felt like practice . They were just obvious, natural things to do.
2. Today, when I’m short on resources, each activity is a conscious choice. I’m choosing to have dinner with a friend, then a drink with another consultant, instead of going to bed early. Tomorrow, I’m choosing to turn down an invitation so I can go home and resume my research into magick that non-mages can feel. Each is a conscious choice, and each one makes me happy.
And all these choices are making me realize how often I fail to consciously decide, and how often that makes me lose a day, and how my life would probably be better if I’d been consciously choosing for the past 6 months. So, that’s a new project for me: Consciously choose what I do each day. Look for a follow-up on that in the coming weeks.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Learning Magick, PersonalStory
Curious, Mike, when you “consciously choose” in this way if it is similar to when I might say I “let my intuition guide me”? That is, there’s a sort of natural impulse of knowing that says “this is what I need to do next” in a way that feels like it fits, flows and is just the right thing?
Not a sciencey thing on my part, obviously, but I wonder if it’s a similar experience despite the difference in wording.
When I imagine letting my intuition guide me, I imagine arriving at an answer without conscious deliberation. It’s not effortless, but it’s more about listening than it is about thinking.
Consciously choosing is about keeping my priorities in mind. It’s about consciously thinking not just about the event I was invited to, but about what I’d be giving up by going to it — the economics term is “opportunity cost.” So, I don’t think it’s the same thing.
But I also do things where I let my intuition guide me. I’ll be making a plan of research, and not know why, but just have a feeling that something important is in a certain area. Or in yesterday’s post, the feeling that my first plan wasn’t brilliant, that was more of an intuition than a reasoned idea: I was on the train and said, “This feels like my only plan, not my best plan.” It was a line from a book I read recently. I didn’t really know why it felt that way, because often I only have one plan but it feels good, but that was my intuition. So, I do have some experiences where my intuition guides me, but this consciously deciding isn’t one of them.
Of course, that may be a matter of practice. Maybe once I get used to consciously considering the opportunity cost, it’ll develop into something automatic, and feel more like an intuition than a conscious process. Interesting possibility, really.
I see what you mean. I think it does become more automatic/intuitive at some point.
I’m also fascinated by the occasional studies that imply we actually make all our decisions before we are consciously aware of them, and then go through the reasoning process afterwards, so we *think* we are deciding deliberately but it’s really all a bit more spontaneous. (overview of the idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will)